It took Google probably 15 years to fully evil-ize. Anthropic ... two?

There is no "ethical capitalism" big tech company possible, esp once VC is involved, and especially with the current geopolitical circumstances.

Department of Defense is the official name, and they did have a choice: they could have stopped working with the military. But they chose money and evil.

It doesn't matter that there exists another name on some paper, when all official, ceremonial and public communications use this name. The old name is about as worthless as the constitution or the senate at this point. The executive branch has successfully taken over the country.

It's just a silly woke secretary choosing their own imaginary pronouns.

They also have never had any guarantees they wouldn't f*ck around with non-US citizens, for surveillance and "security", because like most US tech companies they consider us to be second/lower class human beings of no relevance, even when we pay them money.

At least Google, in its early days, attempted a modest and naive "internationalism" and tried to keep their hands clean (in the early days) of US foreign policy things... inheriting a kind of naive 1990s techno-libertarian ethos (which they threw away during the time I worked there, anyways). I mean, they only kinda did, but whatever.

Anthropic has been high on its own supply since its founding, just like OpenAI. And just as hypocritical.

You can be correct and not play into their game by ignoring the name change completely.

Inner workings were determined by me, not the LLM. It assisted in generating inputs which had 100% boolean results in the output.

I kind of wish they had forced the governments hand and made them do it. Just to show the public how much interference is going on.

They say it wasn't related. Like every thing that has happened across tech/media, the company is forced to do something, then issues statement about 'how it wasn't related to the obvious thing the government just did'.

Makes perfect sense!!

If a company is deemed a "supply chain risk" it makes perfect sense to compel it to work with the military, assuming the latter will compel them to fix the issues that make them such a risk.

If they’re operating under a different definition of supply chain risk, I don’t have a clue.

It is not about disciplining them to get better.

1. So one option is about forcing them to produce something. You must build this for us.

2 The other option is saying they are compromised so stop using them all together. We will not use what you build for us at all because we don't trust it.

So . Contradictory.

Or, more likely, adding the "core safety promise" was just them playing hard to the government to get a better deal, and the government showed them they can play the same game.

Anybody involved should also be prohibited from starting a private company using their IP and catering to the same domain for 5-10 years after they leave.

Non-profits where the CEO makes millions or billions are a joke.

And if e.g. your mission is to build an open browser, being paid by a for-profit to change its behavior (e.g. make theirs the default search engine) should be prohibited too.

Which just doesn't seem like it should be true?

Sure, some "public benefit" missions could scale sideways and employ a lot of cheap labor, not suffering from a salary cap at all. But other missions would require rare high end high performance high salary specialists who are in demand - and thus expensive. You can't rely on being able to source enough altruists that will put up with being paid half their market worth for the sake of the mission.

That's exactly what a non-profit should be able to rely on. And not just "half their market worth", but even many times less.

Else we can just say "we can't really have non-profits, because everybody is a greedy pig who doesn't care about public benefit enough to make a sacrifice of profits - but still a perfectly livable salary" - and be done with it.

The real danger is "We make mountains of money, but everyone dies, including us."

The top of the top researchers think this is a real possibility - people like Geoffrey Hinton - so it's not an extremist negative-for-the-sake-of-it POV.

It's going to be poetic if the Free Markets Are Optimal and Greed-is-Rational Cult actually suicides the species, as a final definitive proof that their ideology is wrong-headed, harmful, and a tragic failure of human intelligence.

But here we are. The universe doesn't care. It's up to us. If we're not smart enough to make smart choices, then we get to live - or die - with the consequences.

B corps are like recycling programs, a nice logo.

E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-...

Recycling mostly means "sent to landfills in the third world":

https://earth.org/waste-colonialism-a-brief-history-of-dumpi...

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/opinion/trash-recycling-g...

> Recycling mostly means "sent to landfills in the third world"

This is less true now that China banned plastic waste imports.

I agree though that the average person might overestimate how much of their waste can be recycled. However, many materials are recycled and then re-used, so it's not like the whole concept is a scam.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critics-call-out-plastics-indus...

Weaker is fine if those working there are actually true to the mission for the mission, are not for the profit.

Same with FOSS really, e.g. I'd rather have a weaker Linux that's an actual comminity project run by volunteers, than a stronger Linux that's just corporate agendas, corporate hires with an open license on top.

“Don’t be evil”. But yes, this behavior made me think about Google too. Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

The press always say "the Pentagon negotiates". Does any publication have an evidence that it is "the Pentagon" and not Hegseth? In general, I see a lot of common sense from the real Pentagon as opposed to the Secretary of War.

I hope Westpoint will check for AI psychosis in their entrance interviews and completely forbid AI usage. These people need to be grounded.

https://www.westpoint.edu/about/modernization-plan/artificia...

“At this point”? It was always the case, it’s just harder to hide it the more time passes. Anyone can claim anything they want about themselves, it’s only after you’ve had a chance to see them in the situations which test their words that you can confirm if they are what they said.

Could you describe the model that you think might work well?

That model already exists and has worked well for decades. It's called being a regular ass corporation.

the point is that it _is_ the only possible model in our marvellous Friedmanian economic structure of shareholder primacy. When the only incentive is profit, if your company isn't maximising profit then it will lose to other companies who are. You can hope that the self-imposed ethics guardrails _are_ maximising profit because it the invisible hand of the market cares about that, but 1. it never really does (at scale) and 2. big influences (such as the DoD here) can sway that easily. So we're stuck with negative externalities because all that's incentivised is profit.

I'm curious about your thinking on this subject, if you email me at the email on my profile I have some specific questions about your views on this matter.

We've already created a digital sovereign nation called State of Utopia which will be available at stateofutopia.com or stofut.com for short, our manifesto is here: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d6b35b81-0eeb-4e41-9628-5...

We have real services you can use immediately, such as this p2p phone/chat/video service without time limits (Zoom has a 1 hour meeting limit for free accounts) and no tracking: https://stateofutopia.com/instacall.html

Just yesterday we published a fitness tool proof of concept: https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/bodyfat/

We do believe that it is important to have market dynamics, and our model is for this state to own state-owned companies as well. Getting this model right is important to us and we would like to engage with you on this subject. We hope you'll email us to discuss your thoughts further.

If regular corporations are sued for not acting in the interests of shareholders, that would suggest that one could file a suit for this sort of corporate behavior.

I'm not even a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV) and public benefit corporations seem to be fairly new, so maybe this doesn't have any precedent in case law, but if you couldn't sue them for that sort of thing, then there's effectively no difference between public benefit corporations and regular corporations.

This is what we were all going on about 15 years ago when Maryland was the first state to make PBCs legal. We got called negative at the time.

we're less than a year away from automated drones flying over crowds of protestors, gathering all electronic signals and face-id, making lists of everyone present, notifying employees and putting legal pressure on them to terminate everyone while adding them to watchlists or "no fly" lists

REALLY putting the "auto" in autocracy while everyone continues to pretend it's democracy

* Our shareholders will probably sue us

> The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter.

It combines interpretation of meaning with ambiguity to allow the reporter to assert anything they want. The ambiguity is there to protect the identity of the source but it has to be a more discrete disclosure of information in return. If you can't check the person you can still check what they said.

I would be ok with direct quotes from an anonymous source. That removes the interpretation of meaning at least.

As it is written, it would not be inaccurate to say this if their source was the lesswrong post, or even an earlier thread here on HN.

Phrasing "A source with direct knowledge of the situation" might remove some of the leeway for editorialising, but without sharing what the source actually said, it opens the door to saying anything at all and declaring "That's what I thought they meant" when challenged.

It's unfalsifyible journalism.

https://www.theverge.com/press-room/22772113/the-verge-on-ba...

On their podcast, they frequently bring up how tech company PR teams try to move as much conversation with journalists as possible into "on background", uncited, generic sourcing.

Write essays about AI safety in the application.

An entire interview dedicated to pretending that you truly only care about AI safety and ethics and nothing else.

Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world.

In reality it was a mid-level manager interviewing a mid-level engineer (me), both putting on a performance while knowing fully well that we'd do what the bosses told us to do.

And that is exactly what is happening now. The mission has been scrubbed, and the thousands of "ethical" engineers you hired are all silent now that real money is on the line.

The structural problem is that once you've taken billions in VC, safety becomes a negotiable constraint rather than a core value. The board's fiduciary duty runs toward returns, not toward whatever was in the mission statement. PBC status doesn't change that in practice — there's basically zero enforcement mechanism.

What's wild is how fast the cycle has compressed. Google took maybe 15 years to go from "don't be evil" to removing it from the code of conduct. OpenAI took about 5 years from nonprofit to capped-profit to whatever they are now. Anthropic is speedrunning it in under 3. At this rate the next AI startup will launch as a PBC and pivot before their Series B closes.

> I take significant responsibility for this change.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HzKuzrKfaDJvQqmjh/responsibl...

> Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded the EA charity evaluator GiveWell, says that while he used to work on trying to help the poor, he switched to working on artificial intelligence because of the “stakes”:

> “The reason I currently spend so much time planning around speculative future technologies (instead of working on evidence-backed, cost-effective ways of helping low-income people today—which I did for much of my career, and still think is one of the best things to work on) is because I think the stakes are just that high.”

> Karnofsky says that artificial intelligence could produce a future “like in the Terminator movies” and that “AI could defeat all of humanity combined.” Thus stopping artificial intelligence from doing this is a very high priority indeed.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/09/defective-altrui...

He is just giving everyone permission to do bad things by saying a lot of words around it.

Isn’t that the opposite of what he’s saying? He’s saying it could become that powerful, and given that possibility it’s incredibly important that we do whatever we can to gain more control of that scenario

The quote was from 2022 for the first pivot to AI to prevent it from becoming a terminator style entity. The last pivot was not in the quote but is the topic of this current Hacker News post, where takes credit for dropping the safety pledge:

"That decision included scrapping the promise to not release AI models if Anthropic can’t guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance."

I expect the next pivot will be that we need to allow the US military to use Anthropic to kill people because otherwise they will use a less pure AI to kill people and our Anthropic is better at only killing the bad guys, thus it is the lesser evil.

It's that perfect blend of I'm doing what everyone else are doing, and I'm better than everyone else.

Chefs' Kiss

It was never about helping poor people.

For some reason, the rationalist movement and its offshoots are really pervasive in silicon valley. i don't see it much in the other tech cities.

"move fast and break things" ?

Empty words. I would like to know one single meaningful way he will be held responsible for any negative effects.

Incredibly long and verbose. I will fall short of accusing him of using an AI to generate slop, but whatever happened to people's ability to make short, strong, simple arguments?

If you can't communicate the essence of an argument in a short and simple way, you probably don't understand it in great depth, and clearly don't care about actually convincing anybody because Lord knows nobody is going to RTFA when it's that long...

At best, you're just trying to communicate to academics who are used to reading papers... Need to expect better from these people if we want to actually improve the world... Standards need to be higher.

You can usually find the short version on Twitter.

Or the discipline.

Maybe neither.

> The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't comprehend the timeline we are living in. Every frontier tech company is convinced that the tech they are working towards is as humanity-useful as a cure for cancer, and yet as dangerous as nuclear weapons.

AI is powerful and AI is perilous. Those two aren't mutually exclusive. Those follow directly from the same premise.

If AI tech goes very well, it can be the greatest invention of all human history. If AI tech goes very poorly, it can be the end of human history.

-Irving John Good, 1965

If you want a short, easy way to know what AGI means, it's this: Anything we can do, they can do better. They can do anything better than us.

If we screw it up, everyone dies. Yudkowsky et al are silly, it's not a certain thing, and there's no stopping it at this point, so we should push for and support people and groups who are planning and modeling and preparing for the future in a legitimate way.

It's the difference between "compute is all you need" and "compute+explorative feedback" is all you need. As if science and engineering comes from genius brains not from careful experiments.

Intelligence can be the difference between having to build 20 prototypes and building one that works first try, or having to run a series of 50 experiments and nailing it down with 5.

The upper limit of human intelligence doesn't go high enough for something like "a man has designed an entire 5th gen fighter jet in his mind and then made it first try" to be possible. The limits of AI might go higher than that.

They don't have to be. When they aren't, sometimes we call it "mathematics".

You only have to "test against the real world" if you don't already know the outcome in advance. And you often don't. But you could have. You could have, with the right knowledge and methods, tested the entire thing internally and learned the real world outcome in advance, to an acceptable degree of precision.

We have the knowledge to build CFD models already. The same knowledge could be used to construct a CFD model in your own mind. We have a lot of scattered knowledge that could be used to make extremely elaborate and accurate internal world models to develop things in - if only, you know, your mind was capable of supporting such a thing. And it isn't! Skill issue?

100% this. How long were humans around before the industrial revolution? Quite a while

There is a group of people who think AI is going to ruin the world because they think they themselves (or their superiors) would ruin the world.

There is a group of people who think AI is going to save the world because they think they themselves (or their superiors) would save the world.

Kind of funny to me that the former is typically democratic (those who are supposed to decide their own futures are afraid of the future they've chosen) while the other is often "less free" and are unafraid of the future that's been chosen for them.

There's something compelling about helping assemble the machine. Science fiction was completely wrong about motivation. It's fun.

There's no implication that it's going to do it all magically in its head from first principles; it's become very clear in AI that embodiment and interaction with the real world is necessary. It might be practical for a world model at sufficient levels of compute to simulate engineering processes at a sufficient level of resolution that they can do all sorts of first principles simulated physical development and problem solving "in their head", but for the most part, real ultraintelligent development will happen with real world iterations, robots, and research labs doing physical things. They'll just be far more efficient and fast than us meatsacks.

Intelligence has to have a fitness function, predicting best action for optimal outcome.

Unless we let AI come up with its own goal and let it bash its head against reality to achieve that goal then I’m not sure we’ll ever get to a place where we have an intelligence explosion. Even then the only goal we could give that’s general enough for it to require increasing amounts of intelligence is survival.

But there is something going on right now and I believe it’s an efficiency explosion. Where everything you want to know if right at hand and if it’s not fuguring out how to make it right at hand is getting easier and easier.

All life has intelligence. Anyone who has spent a lot of time with animals, especially a lot of time with a specific animal, knows that they have a sense of self, that they are intelligent, that they have unique personalities, that they enjoy being alive, that they form bonds, that they have desires and wants, that they can be happy, excited, scared, sad. They can react with anger, surprise, gentleness, compassion. They are conscious, like us.

Humans seem to have this extra layer that I will loosely call "reasoning", which has given us an advantage over all other species, and has given some of us an advantage over the majority of the rest of us.

It is truly a scary thing that AI has only this "reasoning", and none of the other characteristics that all animals have.

Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos and Peter Watts Blindsight have different, but very interesting takes on this concept. One postulates that our reasoning, our "big brains" is going to be our downfall, while the other postulates that reasoning is what will drive evolution and that everything else just causes inefficiencies and will cause our downfall.

Who is doing that right now, exactly? And how can we take their tech and turn it into the next profitable phone app?

Stopping it merely requires convincing a relatively small number of people to act morally rather than greedily. Maybe you think that's impossible because those particular people are sociopathic narcissists who control all the major platforms where a movement like this would typically be organized and where most people form their opinions, but we're not yet fighting the Matrix or the Terminator or grey goo, we're fighting a handful of billionaires.

It's an arms race replete with tribalism and the quest for power and taps into everything primal at the root of human behavior. There's no stopping it, and thinking that outcome can happen is foolish; you shouldn't base any plans or hopes for the future on the condition that the whole world decides AGI isn't going to happen and chooses another course. Humans don't operate that way, that would create an instant winner-takes-all arms race, whereas at least with the current scenario, you end up with a multipolar rough level of equivalence year over year.

People similar to you were saying in the 1950s and later that it was inevitable that nuclear weapons would be used in anger in massive attacks.

Although the people in charge are tentatively for AI "progress", if that ever changes, they can and will put a stop to large AI training runs and make it illegal for anyone they don't trust to teach, learn or publish about fundamental algorithmic "improvements" to AI. Individuals and groups pursuing "improvements" will not be able to accept grant money or investment money or generate revenue from AI-based services.

That won't stop all research on such improvements (because some AI researchers are very committed), but it will slow it down to a rate much much slower than the current rate (because the current fast rate depends of rapid communication between researchers who don't each other well, and if communicating about the research were to become illegal, then a researcher can communicate only with those researchers he knows won't rat him out) essentially stopping AI "progress" unless (unluckily for the human species) at the time of the ban, the committed researchers were only one small step away from some massive algorithmic improvement that can be operationalized using the compute resources at their disposal (i.e., much less than the resources they have now).

Will the power elite's attitude towards AI change? I don't know, but if they ever come to have an accurate understanding of the situation, they will recognize that AI "progress" is a potent danger to them personally, and they will shut it down.

It's not a situation like the industrial revolution in England in which texile workers were massively adversely affected (or believed they were) but the people running England were mostly insulated from any adverse effects. In the current situation, the power elite is definitely not insulated from severe adverse consequences if an AI lab creates an AI that is much more competent that the most competent human institutions (e.g., the FBI) and the lab fails to keep the AI under control. And it will fail if it were to use anything like the methods and bodies of knowledge AI labs have been using up to now. And there are very bright people with funding doing their best to explain that to the elite.

Those of you who want AI "progress" to continue until the world is completely transformed need to hope that the power elite are collectively too stupid to recognize a potent short-term threat to their own survival (or the transformation can be completed before the power elite wake up and react). And in my estimation, that is not inevitable.

https://pauseai.info/proposal

They think that a similar solution to the genetic modification treaties and nuclear proliferation treaties can be implemented for AI training.

There are already designs that do not require massive data centers (or even a particularly good smart phone) to outperform average humans in average tasks.

All you'd accomplish by hobbling the data centers is slow the growth of sloppy models that do vastly more compute than is actually required and encourage the growth of models that travel rather directly from problem to solution.

And, now that I'm typing about it, consider this: The largest computational projects ever in the history of the world did not occur in 1/2/5/10 data centers. Modern projects occur across a vast and growing number of smaller data centers. Shit, a large portion of Netflix and Youtube edge clusters are just a rack or a few racks installed in a pre-existing infrastructure.

I know that the current design of AI focusses on raw time to token and time to response, but consider an AGI that doesn't need to think quickly because it's everywhere all at once. Scrappy botnets often clobber large sophisticated networks. WHy couldn't that be true of a distributed AI especially now that we know that larger models can train cheaper models? A single central model on a few racks could discover truths and roll out intelligence updates to it's end nodes that do the raw processing. This is actually even more realistic for a dystopia. Even the single evil AI in the one data center is going to develop viral infection to control resources that it would not typically have access to and thereby increase it's power beyond it's own existing original physical infrastructure.

quick edit to add: At it's peak Folding@Home was utilizing 2.4 EXAflops worth of silicon. At that moment that one single distributed computational project had more compute than easily the top 100 data centers at the time. Let that sink in: The first exa-scale compute was achieved with smartphones, PS3s, and clunky old HP laptops; not a "hyperscaler"

A DGX B200 has a power draw of 14.3 kW and will do 72-144 petaFLOP of AI workload depending on how many bits of accuracy is asked for; this is 5-10 petaFLOP/kW: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-b200/

Data centres are now getting measured in gigawatts. Some of that's cooling and so on. I don't know the exact percent, so let's say 50% of that is compute. It doesn't matter much.

That means 1GW of DC -> 500 MW of compute -> 5e5 kW -> 5e5 * [5-10] PFLOP/s -> 2500 - 5000 exaFLOP/s.

I'm not sure how many B200s have been sold to date?

Stopping AI would be immoral; it has the potential to supercharge technology and productivity, which would massively benefit humanity. Yes there are risks, which have to be managed.

I fall in the latter camp, but I think its a bit naive to claim that there is not a sizable contingent who are in AI solely to become rich and powerful.

Researchers, maybe not. Companies, absolutely yes.

I don’t see how you could assume the likes of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and even Anthropic with all their virtue signaling (for lack of a better term) are motivated by anything other than greed.

The opportunities you chose to list are the greedy ones.

> Yes there are risks, which have to be managed.

How?

As a reminder, we've known about the effect of burning coal on the climate for well over a century, we knew that said climate change would be socially and economically disasterous for half a century, yet the only real progress we're making is because green became cheaper in the short term not just the long term and the man in charge of the USA is still calling climate change and green energy a hoax.

Right now, keeping LLMs aligned with us is easy mode: they're relatively stupid, we can inspect the activations while they run, we can read the transcripts of their "thoughts" when they use that mode… and yet Grok called itself Mecha Hitler, which the US government followed up by getting it integrated into their systems, helping the Pentagon with [classified] and the department of health to advise the general public which vegetables are best inserted rectally.

We are idiots speed-running into something shiny that we don't understand. If we are very very lucky, the shiny thing will not be the headlamp of a fast approaching train.

Technology covers healthcare. I don't see how it's "greedy" to want to cure cancer. But on some level I guess "wanting life to be better" is greedy.

Your attitude is very European, and it's basically why your continent is being left behind. I'm not totally against Europe becoming the world's retirement home, as long as there are places in the world where people are allowed to innovate.

If you'd chosen to list that in the first place, I wouldn't have said what I did; "supercharge technology and productivity" is looking at everything through the lens of money and profit, not the lens of improving the human condition.

> Your attitude is very European, and it's basically why your continent is being left behind

And yours is very American. You talk about managing the risks, but the moment you see anyone doing so, you're against it.

And of course, Europe does have AI, both because keeping up is so much easier and cheaper than being bleeding edge on everything all the time, and of course, how DeepMind may be owned by Google but is a British thing.

Plus: https://mistral.ai

Also, to be blunt, China's almost certain to win any economic or literal arms race you think you're part of; they make too much critical hardware now.

> as long as there are places in the world where people are allowed to innovate.

I would like there to be a world.

When people worry about the end of the world, they usually don't mean to imply its physical disassembly. Sometimes people even respond as if speakers did mean that, saying things like "nukes or climate change wouldn't actually destroy the planet, it will still be here, spinning", as if this was the point.

AI is one of the few things that could, actually, literally, end up with the planet being physically disassembled. "All it needs" is solving the extremely hard challenges of a von Neumann replicator, and, well, solving hard problems is kinda the point of making AI in the first place.

Bullshit. "Technology and productivity" are not the same thing as "money and profit". You're projecting your garden-variety European degrowth ideology onto what I wrote.

> Also, to be blunt, China's almost certain to win any economic or literal arms race you think you're part of; they make too much critical hardware now.

Europeans are so hilariously polarized against the US that they would prefer China, a literal authoritarian dictatorship, to "win any global economic arms race". I guess it's because China is too culturally distant for them to feel insecure over.

> AI is one of the few things that could, actually, literally, end up with the planet being physically disassembled. "All it needs" is solving the extremely hard challenges of a von Neumann replicator, and, well, solving hard problems is kinda the point of making AI in the first place.

It's not worth wringing our hands over science fiction scenarios.

Don't believe all the memes you read on the internet.

Europe isn't degrowth, "degrowth" is a mix of a meme and environmental scientists; Europe is in fact still growing, thanks to US shenanigans even with tech stuff that we'd prefer to outsource due to the well known economic point of "comparative advantage", and thanks to Russia's invasion we also sped up energy transition and defence sector.

> Europeans are so hilariously polarized against the US that they would prefer China, a literal authoritarian dictatorship, to "win any global economic arms race". I guess it's because China is too culturally distant for them to feel insecure over.

Prefer? No. Simply look at the back of most electronics, "Designed by … in California, assembled [by Foxconn] in China" at best, at worst the entire business is unpronounceable in English. Even when you may think you've got yourself an American factory, so many of the bits arr usually made in China, or in Taiwan which is unfortunately very insecure right now. You may have a stated goal of on-shoring, but even with the most competent leadership this would be a very hard multi-decade project.

That doesn't make China good in any objective sense, it's not like China's above doing to us what was done to them in their "century of humiliation". Just, powerful.

Their power is aside from any question of should we prefer the authoritarian in charge of a democracy who threatened to invade, or the authoritarian in charge of a one-party state that's doing some genocide who wants to sell us stuff, because two things can both be bad.

> It's not worth wringing our hands over science fiction scenarios.

AI is already a sci-fi technology relative to what I had as a kid. Or indeed relative to just after the first ChatGPT was released, given what people were saying back then that LLMs would "never" do.

The idea you could talk to your computer and it would write a computer program for you that could solve a problem that you had? Sci-fi.

The idea of computer could generate, not simply find but generate, an image according to some prompt of yours? Compose a song? Win awards for its out when people didn't realise computers doing it was an option? Sci-fi so hard it's become a meme of a robot saying "can you?", as disbelief of that was expressed as a line from the film "I, Robot", 2004.

People are still arguing if these things have or have not passed the Turing test, someone has even made a game about this for Hacker News comments, I game in which I score 0, or even scored negative given I only identified false positives. Sci-fi.

And it's not just LLMs, Even just solving chess was sci-fi when I was a kid. Then it was Go. Now protein folding is solved, and thousands of novel toxins have been found by AI. And yet, when I have told AI-Laissez-faire-accelerationists stuff like this latter example, they still doubt AI is capable of doing anything dangerous.

But the worst part of it? The AI which called itself Mecha Hitler, that AI is in use by the Pentagon, the DoD is trying to bully a different AI company that doesn't want to be used for military stuff.

We're in a sci-fi future.

And remember too that making a "robot army" that can replace all human labour is a stated goal of one of the people running an AI company. Don't get me wrong, I hope he's talking out of his rear on this, but failing to plan is planning to fail.

The things this definition misses: First, 'intelligence' is a poorly defined and overly broad term. Second, machine intelligence is profoundly different than biological intelligence. Third, “surpassing humans” is not a single threshold event because machine and human intelligence are not only shaped differently, they're highly non-linear. LLMs are a particular class of possible machine intelligences which can be much more intelligent than humans on some dimensions and much less intelligent on others. Some of the gaps can be solved by scaling and brilliant engineering but others are fundamental to the nature of LLMs.

> an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines

There is a huge leap between "surpass all the intellectual activities of any man" and "invent extraordinary breakthroughs and then reliably repeat that feat in a sequential, directed fashion in the exact way required to enable sustained iteration of substantial self-improvement across infinite generations in a runaway positive feedback loop". That's an ability no human or collective has ever come close to demonstrating even once, much less repeatedly. (hint: the hardest parts are "reliably repeat", "extraordinary breakthroughs" and "directed fashion"). A key, yet monumental, subtlety is that the self- improvements must not only be sustained and substantial but also exponentially amplify the self-improvement function itself by discovering novel breakthroughs which build coherently on one other - over and over and over.

The key unknown of the 'Foom Hypothesis' is categorical. What kind of 'difficult feat' this is? There are difficult feats humans haven't demonstrated like nuclear fusion, but in that example we at least have evidence from stellar fusion that it's possible. Then there are difficult feats like room-temp superconductors, which are not known to be possible but aren't ruled out. The 'Foom Hypothesis' is a third category of 'hard' which is conceptually coherent but could be physically blocked by asymptotic barriers, like faster-than-light travel under relativity.

Assuming Foom is like fusion - just a challenging engineering and scaling problem - is a category error. In reality, Foom requires superlinear, recursively amplifying cognitive returns—and we have no empirical evidence that such returns can exist for artificial or biological intelligences. The only prior we have for open‑ended intelligence improvement is biological evolution which shows extremely slow and unreliable sublinear returns at best. And even if unbounded self‑improvement is physically possible, it may be practically unachievable due to asymptotic barriers in the same way approaching light speed requires exponentially more energy.

Just unplug the goddamn thing.

Also consider if something is so bad it makes you wince or cringe, then your adversaries are prepared to use it.

LLMs of today are already economically important enough to warrant serious security.

Those aren't even AGI yet, let alone ASI. They aren't actively trying to make humans support their existence. They still get that by the virtue of being what they are.

It won't end civilization for dropping the guardrails, but it will surely enable bad actors to do more damage than before (mass scams, blackmail, deepfake nudes, etc.)

There are companies that don't feel the pressure to make their models play loose and fast, so I don't buy anthropic's excuse to do so.

AI at AGI to ASI tier is less of "a bigger stick" and more of "an entire nonhuman civilization that now just happens to sit on the same planet as you".

The sheer magnitude of how wrong that can go dwarfs even that of nuclear weapon proliferation. Nukes are powerful, but they aren't intelligent - thus, it's humans who use nukes, and not the other way around. AI can be powerful and intelligent both.

Or to be more optimistic, that the same entity directed 24/7 in unlimited instances at intractable problems in any field, delivering a rush of breakthroughs and advances wouldn't be a type of 'salvation'?

Yes neither of these outcomes nor the self-updating omniscient genius itself is certain. Perhaps there's some wall imminent we can't see right now (though it doesn't look like it). But the rate of advance in AI is so extreme, it's only responsible to try to avoid the darker outcome.

Stop mistaking science fiction for science.

And "more cybercrime" is a far, far cry from the sky-is-falling doomerism I was responding to.

A lot of AI harnesses today can already "decide to take an action" in every way that matters. And we already know that they can sometimes disregard the intent of their creators and users both while doing so. They're just not capable enough to be truly dangerous.

AI capabilities improve as the technology develops.

Like the executive who deleted all her emails -- humans giving tons of control and access, and being extremely compliant to digital systems is all it takes. Give agent control of bank and your social media, and it already has all the movie scripts and mobster movie themes to exploit and blackmail you effectively with very rudimentary methods (threats, coercion, blackmail, etc.).

Just spoofing a simple email with the account it gained access too at the Meta exec's email (had it hit an email with an attack prompt), could have been enough to initiate some kind of thing like this. For example, by emailing everyone at the company and in contacts with commands that would be caught by other bots. No super-intelligence needed, just a good prompt and some human negligence.

The IF here is doing some very heavy lifting. Last I checked, for profit companies don't have a good track record of doing what's best for humanity.

You would think that, but a lot of kings and people in power have been able to achieve something similar over our humanity's history. The trick is to not make things "completely worthless". Just to increase the gap as much as (in)humanly possible while marching us towards a deeper sense of forced servitude.

As has been said at many all hands:

Let's all work on the last invention needed by humans.

Amd they alone are responsible enough to govern it.

If they were unrelated, Anthropic wouldn’t be doing this this week because obviously everyone will conflate the two.

N.B. the time travel aspect also required suspension of disbelief, but somehow that was easier :-)

You expect the humans to follow laws, follow orders, apply ethics, look for opportunities, etc. That said, you very quickly have people circling the wagons and protecting the autonomy of JSOC when there is some problem. In my mind it's similar with AI because the point is serving someone. As soon as that power is undermined, they start to push back. Similarly, they aren't motivated to constrain their power on their own. It needs external forces.

edit: missed word.

With the latest competing models they are now realizing they are an "also" provider.

Sobering up fast with ice bucket of 5.3-codex, Copilot, and OpenCode dumped on their head.

Curing all cancers would increase population growth by more than 10% (9.7-10m cancer related deaths vs current 70-80m growth rate), and cause an average aging of the population as curing cancer would increase general life expectancy and a majority of the lives just saved would be older people.

We'd even see a jobs and resources shock (though likely dissimilar in scale) as billions of funding is shifted away from oncologists, oncology departments, oncology wards, etc. Billions of dollars, millions of hospital beds, countless specialized professionals all suddenly re-assigned just as in AI.

Honestly the cancer/nuclear/tech comparison is rather apt. All either are or could be disruptive and either are or could be a net negative to society while posing the possibility of the greatest revolution we've seen in generations.

If anything that makes me more hopeful and not less. It's asking too much that major decisionmakers, even expert/technical/SV-backed ones, really understand the risks with any new technology, and it always has been. To take an example: our current mostly-secure internet authentication and commerce world was won as a hard-fought battle in the trenches.

The Tech CEOs rushed ahead into the brave new world and dropped the ball, because while "people" were telling them the risks they couldn't really understand them.

But now? Well, they all saw War Games growing up. They kinda get it in the way that they weren't ever going to grok SQL injection or Phishing.

If anything the weapons kept the industry trucking on - if you want to develop and maintain a nuclear weapons arsenal then a commercial nuclear power industry is very helpful.

The same will go with AI, btw. Westerners' pearl clenching about AI guardrails won't stop China from doing anything.

you mean like the tens of billions poured into fusion research?

They're not really, it's always been a form of PR to both hype their research and make sure it's locked away to be monetized.

The reason Claude became popular is because it made shit up less often than other models, and was better at saying "I can't answer that question." The guardrails are quality control.

I would rather have more reliable models than more powerful models that screw up all the time.

Maybe some of the more naive engineers think that. At this point any big tech businesses or SV startup saying they're in it to usher in some piece of the Star Trek utopia deserves to be smacked in the face for insulting the rest of us like that. The argument is always "well the economic incentive structure forces us to do this bad thing, and if we don't we're screwed!" Oh, so ideals so shallow you aren't willing to risk a tiny fraction of your billions to meet them. Cool.

Every AI company/product in particular is the smarmiest version of this. "We told all the blue collar workers to go white collar for decades, and now we're coming for all the white collar jobs! Not ours though, ours will be fine, just yours. That's progress, what are you going to do? You'll have to renegotiate the entire civilizational social contract. No we aren't going to help. No we aren't going to sacrifice an ounce of profit. This is a you problem, but we're being so nice by warning you! Why do you want to stand in the way of progress? What are you a Luddite? We're just saying we're going to take away your ability to pay your mortgage/rent, deny any kids you have a future, and there's nothing you can do about it, why are you anti-progress?"

Cynicism aside, I use LLMs to the marginal degree that they actually help me be more productive at work. But at best this is Web 3.0. The broader "AI vision" really needs to die

Reminds me of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

which has the same kind of shitty conclusion.

You can never figure out if the people selling something are lying about it's capabilities, or if they've actually invented a new form of intelligence that can rival or surpass billions of years of evolution?

I'd like to introduce you to Occam Razor

Human creations have surpassed billions of years of evolution at several functions. There are no rockets in nature, nor animals flying at the speed of a common airliner. Even cars, or computers or everything in the modern world.

I think this is a bit like the shift from anthropocentric view of intelligence towards a new paradigm. The last time such shift happened heads rolled.

Made me laugh. Indeed opinions seem to carry more weight if they are a vibe :D

> I'm asking whether they are knowingly deceiving people or whether they have deluded themselves into believing what they are saying.

I'd bet it's both. Engineers/people making it, are drowning in the hype. Combined with the notion of how hard it is understand something when your salary, or your stock options are based on your lack of understanding. I suspect they care more about building the cool thing, than the nuance they're ignoring to make all the misleading or optimistic claims; whichever side you take depending on how much you actually believe of the inevitability... which look exactly like lies if you're not drinking the koolaid. But expected excitement when your life is all about this "magic"

They disagree on the timelines, the architectures, the exact steps to get there, the severity of risks. Can you get there with modified LLMs by 2030, or would you need to develop novel systems and ride all the way to 2050? Is there a 5% chance of an AI oopsie ending humankind, or a 25% chance? No agreement on that.

But a short line "AGI is possible, powerful and perilous" is something 9 out of 10 of frontier AI researchers at the frontier labs would agree upon.

At which point the question becomes: is it them who are deluded, or is it you?

If you claim "AGI is possible" without knowing how we'll actually get there you're just writing science fiction. Which is fine, but I'd really rather we don't bet the economy on it.

Would not having a complete foolproof step by step plan to obtaining a nuclear bomb somehow make me wrong then?

The so-called "plan" is simply "fund the R&D, and one of the R&D teams will eventually figure it out, and if not, then, at least some of the resources we poured into it would be reusable elsewhere". Because LLMs are already quite useful - and there's no pathway to getting or utilizing AGI that doesn't involve a lot of compute to throw at the problem.

In 1940 I might have said "fusion power is possible" based entirely on what advanced psychics knowledge I had. And I would have been correct, according to the laws of physics it is possible. We still don't have it though. When watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon I might have said "moon colonies are possible", and I'd have been right there too. And yet...

For AI in particular, the economics currently favor ongoing capability R&D - and even if they didn't favor AI R&D directly (i.e. if ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion never happened), they would still favor making the computational inputs of AI R&D cheaper over time.

Building advanced AIs is becoming easier and cheaper. It's just that the bar of "good enough" has gone off to space, and a "good enough" from 2020 is, nowadays, profoundly unimpressive.

I'm not sure how much does it take to reach AGI. No one is sure of it. But the path there is getting shorter over time, clearly. And LLMs existing, improving and doing what they do makes me assume shorter AGI timelines, and call for a vote of no confidence on human exceptionalism.

Why do you assume there is no hard limit we’ll hit with the current tech that prevents us from reaching AGI?

If, let's say, in 2029, it turns out that autoregressive transformer LLMs have exhausted their potential, the R&D that goes into improving them now would be put into finding alternatives. And I struggle to imagine not finding any.

Maybe that was a sensible thing to think in 1926, when the closest things we had to "an artificial replica of human intelligence" was the automatic telephone exchange and the mechanical adding machine. But knowledge and technology both have advanced since.

Now, we're in 2026, and the list of "things that humans can do but machines can't" has grown quite thin. "Human brain is doing something truly magical" is quite hard to justify on technical merits, and it's the emotional value that makes the idea linger.

Also, the real thing (intelligence) as it is currently in operation isn't that well understood

> At which point the question becomes: is it them who are deluded, or is it you?

Given the current very asymptotic curve of LLM quality by training, and how most of the recent improvements have been better non LLM harnesses and scaffolding. I don't find the argument that transformer based Generative LLMs are likely to ever reach something these labs would agree is AGI (unless they're also selling it as it)

Then, you can apply the same argument to Natural General Intelligence. Humans can do both impressive and scary stuff.

I'll ignore the made up 5 and 25%, and instead suggest that pragmatic and optimistic/predictive world views don't conflict. You can predict the magic word box you feel like you enjoy is special and important, making it obvious to you AGI is coming. While it also doesn't feel like a given to people unimpressed by it's painfully average output. The problem being the optimism that Transformer LLMs will evolve into AGI requires a break through that the current trend of evidence doesn't support.

Will humans invent AGI? I'd bet it's a near certainty. Is general intelligence impressive and powerful? Absolutely, I mean look, Organic general intelligence invented artificial general intelligence in the future... assuming we don't end civilization with nuclear winter first...

Recent improvements being somehow driven by harnesses and scaffolding rather than training?

With that last bit, I'm confident that you're not in ML, and not even keeping track of the things from what's known to public.

> At which point the question becomes: is it them who are deluded, or is it you?

No one. It is always "possible". Ask me 20 years ago after watching a sci-fi movie and I'd say the same.

Just like with software projects estimating time doesn't work reliably for R&D.

We'll still get full self-driving electric cars and robots next year too. This applies every year.

I've taken a Waymo and it seemed pretty self driving.

Claude only talks about safety, but never released anything open source.

All this said I’m surprised China actually delivered so many open source alternatives. Which are decent.

Why westerns (which are supposed to be the good guys) didn’t release anything open source to help humanity ? And always claim they don’t release because of safety and then give the unlimited AI to military? Just bullshit.

Let’s all be honest and just say you only care about the money, and whomever pays you take.

They are businesses after all so their goal is to make money. But please don’t claim you want to save the world or help humans. You just want to get rich at others expenses. Which is totally fair. You do a good product and you sell.

My guess is that they know they are not competitors so they make it cheaper or free to hinder the surge of a super competitor.

im still working through this issue myself but hinton said releasing weights for frontier models was "crazy" because they can be retrained to do anything. i can see the alignment of corporate interest and safety converging on that point.

from the point of view of diminishing corporate power i do think it is essential to have open weights. if not that, then the companies should be publicly owned to avoid concentration of unaccountable power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66WiF8fXL0k&t=544s

But frankly I feel like the founders of Anthropic and others are victim of the same hallucination.

LLMs are amazing tools. They play back & generate what we prompt them to play back, and more.

Anybody who mistakes this for SkyNet -- an independent consciousness with instant, permanent, learning and adaptation and self-awareness, is just huffing the fumes and just as delusional as Lemoine was 4 years ago.

Everyone of of us should spend some time writing an agentic tool and managing context and the agentic conversation loop. These things are primitive as hell still. I still have to "compact my context" every N tokens and "thinking" is repeating the same conversational chain over and over and jamming words in.

Turns out this is useful stuff. In some domains.

It ain't SkyNet.

I don't know if Anthropic is truly high on their own supply or just taking us all for fools so that they can pilfer investor money and push regulatory capture?

There's also a bad trait among engineers, deeply reinforced by survivor bias, to assume that every technological trend follows Moore's law and exponential growth. But that applie[s|d] to transistors, not everything.

I see no evidence that LLMs + exponential growth in parameters + context windows = SkyNet or any other kind of independent consciousness.

Every step on the journey towards SkyNet is worse than the preceding step. Let's not split hairs about which step we're on: it's getting worse, and we should stop that.

They'll ink deals with all sorts of nefarious parties and be involved in all sorts of dubious things while trumpeting their fake non-profit status and wringing their hands about imminent AGI and "alignment" of the created AIs.

The concern I have is not the alignment of the AIs. They're not capable of having one, no matter what role playing window dressing they put on it.

It's the alignment of Anthropic and the people who use their tools that is a concern. So far it seems f*cked.

Riiiiiight.

This sounds like a lie. But if they are telling the truth, that's a terrible timing nonetheless.

It is entirely reasonable to not provide tools to break the law by doing mass surveillance on civilian citizens and to insist the tool not be used automatically to kill a human without a human in the loop. Those are unreasonable demands by an unreasonable regime.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963

https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-hegseth-ai-pentagon-mil...

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2026181748175024510

I don't know where xAI got its training material from, but seeing Musk rewteeting that is refreshing.

Unconstrained accumulation of capital into the hands of the few without appropriate investment into labor is illiberal and incompatible with democracy and true freedom. Those of us who are capitalists see surplus value as a compromise to ensure good economic growth. The hidden subtext of that is that all the wealth accumulated needs to be re-allocated to serve not only capital enterprise, but the needs of society as a whole. It's hard to see the current system as appropriate for that given how blindly and wildly investments are made with no DD or going long, or no effort paid to the social or environmental opportunity costs of certain practices.

A lot of this comes down to the crippling of the SEC and FTC, but even then, investors cry and whine every time you suggest reworking the regs to inhibit some of the predatory practices common in this post-80s era of hypernormalization. Our current system does not resemble a healthy capitalist economy at all. It's rife with monopsony and monopolistic competition, inequality of opportunity, and a strained underclass that's responsible for our inverted population pyramid -- how can you have kids when we're so atomized and there is no village to help you? You can raise kids in a nuclear family if and only if you have enough money to do so. Otherwise, historically, people relied on their communities when raising children in less-than-ideal circumstances. Those communities are drying up.

I think the problem is that every system of economics requires ignoring human nature in order to believe it possibly can work. In order to believe that capitalism doesn't lead to despotic rule you have to ignore the fact that civilizations love a good hierarchy far more than they love justice and fairness.

You can make any system of economics work if you figure out how to deal, head on, with the particular human nature factor that it tries to ignore.

...only lately?

General population: How will AI get to the point where it destroys humanity?

Yudkowsky: [insert some complicated argument about instrumented convergence and deception]

The government: because we told you to.

Again, not saying that AI is useless or anything. Just that we're more likely to cause our own downfall with weaker AI, than some abstract super AGI. The bar for mass destruction and oppression is lower than the bar for what we typically think of as intelligence for the benefit for humanity ( with the right systems in place, current AI systems are more than enough to get the job done - hence why the Pentagon wants it so bad...)

Are people really attempting to have LLMs replace vision models in robots, and trying to agentically make a robot work with an LLM?? This seems really silly to me, but perhaps I am mistaken.

The only other thing I could think of is real-time translation during special ops with parabolic microphones and AR goggles...

It's just systems plumbing (surveillance) and AI. It's a combination of weaker technologies and consolidation of power.

This does not require a physical robot super AGI(though I would not be surprised if fully autonomous robots are not on the table already)

Even if it were ever done with good intentions, it is an open invitation for benefit hoarding and margin fixing.

Do you realy want to create this future where only a select few anointed companies and some governments have access to super advanced intelligent systems, where the rest of the planet is subjected to and your own ai access is limited to benign basal add pushing propaganda spewing chatbots as you bingewatch the latest "aw my ballz"?

* AI and states cannot peacefully coexist, and AI is not going to be stopped. Therefore, we must begin to deprecate states.

I think it's very unlikely that this is unrelated to the pressure from the US administration, as the anonymous-but-obvious-anthropic-spokesperson asserts.

We're at a point now where the nation states are all totally separate creatures from their constituencies, and the largest three of them are basically psychotic and obsessed with antagonizing one another.

In order to have a peaceful AI age, we need _much_ smaller batches of power in the world. The need for states that claim dominion over whole continents is now behind us; we have all the tools we need to communicate and coordinate over long distances without them.

Please, I pray for a gentle, peaceful anarchism to emerge within the technocratic leagues, and for the elder statesmen of the legacy states to see the writing on the wall and agree to retire with tranquility and dignity.

Humans are, by nature, forgetful and argumentative. Fourteen hundred years ago, the Qur'an said this unequivocally (20:115, 18:54, 22:8, 18:73). Not to moralize here, I'm just saying if camel-herders could build a medieval superpower out of nothing, they knew something we don't.

Any state or system that insists good humans are always nice, smart, cogent, and/or aware is doomed to fail. A Washington or a Cincinnatus that can get out of his own way (and that of society) is rare indeed, a one-in-a-billion soul. We shouldn't sit around and wait for that, while your run-of-the-mill dictator in a funny hat (or a funny toupée for that one orange fellow) has his way with us.

EDIT: Yeah these speeches about how ai will take all the jobs every 6 months is not helping to sell these Fabulous AI Products (tm). Plus if companies are spending 600 billion in capex for datacenters, surely, they could hire a good PR firm for a couple million?

People don't want to buy AI products for the same reason didn't want to buy meat products from the mob in New York. I'm sure the mob's meat products were adequate but they're scary people!!! See Dial Poultry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Castellano

It's to drive FOMO for investors. He needs tens of billions of capital and is trying to scare them into not looking at his balance sheet before investing. It's reckless, and is soaking up capital that could have gone towards more legitimate investments.

Sounds like one of the white collar jobs that LLMs were supposed to solve

Council on Foreign Relations, 11 months ago: "In 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is essentially writing all of the code."

Axios interview, 8 months ago: "[...] AI could soon eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs."

The Adolescence of Technology (essay), 1 month ago: "If the exponential continues—which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it—then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything."

Don't worry, I know exactly why. $

I totally feel for people with speech pathologies or anxiety that makes it harder for them to communicate verbally, but how is this guy the public face of the company and doing all these interviews by himself? With as much as is at stake, I find it baffling.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the e/acc freaks have some secret society or cabal lol

https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs

Focusing on Dario, his exact quote IIRC was "50% of all white collar jobs in 5 years" which is still a ways off, but to check his track record, his prediction on coding was only off by a month or so. If you revisit what he actually said, he didn't really say AI will replace 90% of all coders, as people widely report, he said it will be able to write 90% of all code.

And dhese days it's pretty accurate. 90% of all code, the "dark matter" of coding, is stuff like boilerplate and internal LoB CRUD apps and typical data-wrangling algorithms that Claude and Codex can one-shot all day long.

Actually replacing all those jobs however will take time. Not just to figure out adoption (e.g. AI coding workflows are very different from normal coding workflows and we're just figuring those out now), but to get the requisite compute. All AI capacity is already heavily constrained, and replacing that many jobs will require compute that won't exist for years and he, as someone scrounging for compute capacity, knows that very well.

But that just puts an upper limit on how long we have to figure out what to do with all those white collar professionals. We need to be thinking about it now.

It's not well established at all. In fact, there is increasing evidence to the contrary if you look outside the HN echo chamber.

The nuanced take is that AI in coding is an amplifier of your engineering culture: teams with strong software discipline (code reviews, tests, docs, CI/CD, etc.) enjoy more velocity and fewer outages, teams with weak discipline suffer more outages. There are at least two large-scale industry reports showing this trend -- DORA 2025 and the latest DX report -- not to mention the infinite anecdotes on this very forum.

> He's trying to scare the market into his pocket.

People say this, but I don't get it. Is portraying yourself as a destroyer of the economy considered good marketing? Maybe there was a case to be made for convincing the government to impose regulations on the industry, but as we're seeing and they're experiencing first hand, the problem is the government.

Hence why all these LLM companies love government contracts, they can't sell to consumers so they'll just steal from tax payers instead.

Cursor: 1 Billion ARR in 24 months -- https://andrew.ooo/posts/cursor-fastest-growing-saas-1b-arr/

Claude Code: 2.5 Billion ARR in 10 months -- https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-s...

And if you suggest that these and other AI companies are lying about revenues or fudging the numbers, it is corroborated from THREE other angles: the investors in these startups, the payment processor for these startups, and the people allocating budgets for the products from these startups! This thread (and its parents with links) is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46773252

Ugh, people here seem to think that all software is react webapps. There are so many technologies and languages this stuff is not very good at. Web apps are basically low hanging fruit. Dario hasn't predicted anything, and he does not have anyone's interests other than his own in mind when he makes his doomer statements.

And it's getting better at the other 10% too. Two years ago ChatGPT struggled to help me with race conditions in a C++ LD_PRELOAD library. It was a side project so I dropped it. Last week Codex churned away for 10 minutes and gave me a working version with tests.

  - It's garbage collected, so variable lifetimes don't need to be traced
  - It's structurally typed, so LLMs can get away with duplicating types as long as the shape fits. 
  - The type system has an escape hatch (any or unknown)
  - It produces nice stack traces
  - The industry has more or less settled styling issues (ie, most typescript looks pretty uniform stylistically).
  - There is an insane amount of open source code to train on
  - Even "compiled" code is somewhat easy(er) to deobfuscate and read (because you're compiling JS to JS)

  - Memory management is important, and tricky
  - Segfaults give you hardly anything to work with
  - There are like a thousand different coding styles
  - Nobody can agree on the proper subset of the language to use (ie, exceptions allowed or not allowed, macros, etc.)
  - Security issues are very much magnified (and they're   already a huge problem in vibecoded typescript)
  - The use cases are a lot more diverse. IE, if you're using typescript you're probably either writing a web page or a server (maybe a command line app). (I'm lumping electron in here, because it's still a web page and a server). C is used for operating systems, games, large hero apps, anything CPU or memory constrained, etc.

I agree C++ is harder, and I still occassionally find a missing free(), but Codex did crack my problem... including fixing a segfault! I had a bunch of strategically placed printfs gated behind an environment variable, it found those, added its own, set the environment variable, and examined the outputs to debug the issue.

I cannot emphasize how mindblowing this is, because years back I had spent an hour+ doing the same thing unsuccessfully before being pulled away.

most of us are getting paid for the other 10%

If you mean "us" as in all software engineers, not at all. The challenge we're facing is exactly that, reskilling the 90% of engineers who have been working on CRUD apps to the 10% that is outside the distribution.

I am a 30-year "veteran" in the industry and in my opinion this cannot be further from the truth but it is often quotes (even before AI). CRUD apps have been a solved problem for quite some time now and while there are still companies who may allow someone to "coast" doing CRUD stuff they are hard to find these days. There is almost always more to it than building dumb stuff. I have also seen (more and more each year) these types of jobs being off-shored to teams for pennies on a dollar.

What I have experienced a lot is teams where there are what I call "innovators" and "closers." "Innovators" do the hard work, figure shit out, architect, design... and then once that is done you give it to "closers" to crank things out. With LLMs now the part of "closers" could be "replaced" but in my experience there is always some part, whether it is 5% or 10% that is difficult to "automate" so-to-speak

But I am concerned precisely because AI is usurping that closing work, which accounts for the bulk of the team. Realistically the innovators will be the only people required. But the innovators are able to do the hard stuff by learning through a lot of hands-on experience and painful lessons, which they typically get by spending a lot of time in the trenches as closers.

And we're only talking about coding here, but this pattern repeats ALL over knowledge work: product, legal, consultancy, finance, accounting, adminstration...

So now the problem is two-fold: how do we get the closers to upskill to innovators a) without the hands-on experience b) faster than AI can replace them?

I can see where Dario is coming from.

I really miss the nerd profile who cared a lot more about tech and science, and a lot less about signaling their righteousness.

How did we get so religious/narcissistic so quickly and as a whole?

We built a behemoth that rewards attention whoring and anti social behavior with money.

The entire playing field is kinda dissapointing, left or right. Which do you wanna be, self-righteous preening snob or batshit macho man?

I'm going for a blend, myself

A pre-commitment means nothing unless you have the mechanisms in place to enforce it.

A pre-sacrifice would be more effective.

"We promise are not going to do __, except if our customers ask us to do, then we absolutely will".

What is the point? Company makes a statement public, so what?

Not the first time this company puts some words in the wind, see Claude Constitution. It's almost like this company is built, from ground up, upon bullshit and slop

Netflix said that they'd never have live TV, or buy a traditional studio, or include ads in their content. Then they did all three.

All companies use principled promises to gain momentum, then drop those principles when the money shows up.

As Groucho Marx used to say: these are my principles, if you don't like them, I have others.

Because at this point, it's too broad to be defined in the context of an LLM, so it feels like they removed a blanket statement of "we will not let you do bad things" (or "don't be evil"), which doesn't really translate into anything specific.

So... all acts are selfish because if it looks unselfish, that just means it was selfish in a hidden way?