If you believe Anthropic believes what they say they do, all of it makes sense.
Generally, in the past when tech companies have made outlandish claims that were not backed by evidence, they're later found out to have lied. This is an ancient pattern going back to the dotcom era and before, but for recent examples you need only look back a few years to the web3 era. If they're not lying, they can show it by producing the results they claim. Until then, they're probably just lying.
> If they're not lying, they can show it by producing the results they claim. Until then, they're probably just lying
Brilliant framework: Anyone making claims about the future is not just speculating, not just wrong, but they are lying.
Claim: GPT-4 is a PhD level expert.
Claim: LLMs "reason"
Claim: LLMs "understand"
Claim: AI will automate jobs away
None of these are "earnest" claims for a company to make (whatever that means). They're vacuous bullshit, and false. It's a bunch of wordsmithing papering over results that are either hidden from view or just unimpressive. Even if the person saying that shit believes it, that's not super relevant--if a company is advertising these capabilities then... just... doesn't do it, that's lying. Corporate statements aren't unilaterally determined by fallible individuals, they're reviewed, crafted products. They can be fairly critiqued as such.
> Brilliant framework: Anyone making claims about the future is not just speculating, not just wrong, but they are lying.
Not just anyone, companies in particular. If a company tells you it's building something to replace jobs, and then it doesn't do it, that company lied.
My company itself (possible only with AI) does the work of at least several dozen people across my hundred customers or so. Those jobs are now automated away.
Does that mean you're lying, or just overly confident (and wrong) in your speculations?
FWIW, I wouldn't put Sam Altman in the category of "earnest." I'm not sure if you just aren't aware that Anthropic and OpenAI are different companies, or if you're arguing dishonestly by trying to put sama quotes in here? But weird move in either case!
I'm glad you're seeing some success with this. I don't pretend to get it, maybe I'm too old and worn out.
I'm not sure there's anything "to get." But given your level of curiosity it's not surprising.
Web3 was absolute horseshit (and always was), so if you're blending AI with that based on the similarly grandiose claims and the extremely annoying boosterism, I think you should try hitting reset and engaging with LLMs from a cleaner slate.
EDIT: And, if it wasn't abundantly clear, fuck you and the goddamn fucking horse you rode in on, you horrible sack of shit. In the best faith, of course. Die in a Fucking Fire.
IMO they are using the cult messaging to distract the public so they take out all the oxygen in the room regarding people that care about the immediate impacts (climate exacerbation, ease of scamming, degrading job prospects, increasing income inequality).
Whenever real concerns are brought up against these companies they are always ignored while claiming the real concern is the fantasy of a machine god turning into skynet.
If they believe they're creating "a machine god" and that it's better it's their machine god than someone else's (which, given the other contenders, I tend to agree with), then all the corollaries you mention are mostly irrelevant.
Whether you believe they're creating a machine god is irrelevant. They believe that they are. It would be helpful if you could create an actually good argument for why they cannot or are not creating a machine god, but it turns out there are no good arguments for why it's impossible to do so. And so... they shall try.
Good to know.
Arms races always work out great for arms dealers. Less so for the average Joe.
Companies don't have to do that. If they're getting into actually dangerous territory, they can stop as soon as they want to.
If you don't believe that, or you don't believe that the frontier labs believe that, then sure, it makes no sense. But they probably do. The people at these companies literally dedicated their lives to building this specific thing that, up until people had to make tradeoffs between "that looks risky" and "that looks useful", virtually everyone agreed would be a dangerous technology.
What apparently many people on HN failed to appreciate is that the thing that makes it dangerous is the fact that it grows in utility.
It's like a prisoner's dilemma where one party is loudly lecturing the other about the obvious benefits of cooperation while also obviously working on defecting. They want to have their cake and eat it too. Maybe they really are the pure-of-heart Chosen Ones destined to lead us around the great filter, but I don't see why I should believe that's the case when their behavior is just as easily explained as maneuvering toward being the winner who takes it all.
Yes, this dynamic is exactly the one that anyone who's concerned about AI is concerned about. I don't know why you state this as if it's evidence against the concerns lol. Someone being concerned about the incentives of a situation doesn't de facto make them immune to those incentives, obviously.
The implication that someone who's concerned about an arms race dynamic could simply opt out of the system that produces that dynamic is simply confused about what arms race dynamics are. The entire point is that it's a trap, and it's a trap even if you know it's a trap, and even if you don't like that it's a trap. There's nothing dishonest or hypocritical about being in the trap: it is literally a trap –– that is what it does and why it is bad!
I'm confused by these comments that imply people believe Dario et al are "pure-of-heart Chosen Ones destined to lead us around the great filter." Who? I've never seen it. And any AI-doomer is probably of the opinion that the entire question of Dario's or anyone else's personal moral character is 99% irrelevant. Because, again, it's a trap. The dynamics at play are so much larger than whether someone irks people for their lecturing tone. I would much rather give my money to Dario, who seems like a generally good person, versus Sama, who seems like a complete snake, but I'm under no illusions that doing so changes the fundamental dynamics that are steering us to AI doom. I doubt anyone does.
And yes, obviously they are angling toward being the winner who takes it all. That is literally the trap. If you believe what they believe, yelling "let's cooperate!" while hurdling towards the finish line and tripping your competitors is the only reasonable thing to do. That is the problem.
I think you're reading some subtext into my comment that I didn't intend. Knowing myself, I assume the scare quotes there are just a bit of casual irony re: the insanely high stakes here. The word "concerns" as used by previous commenters doesn't seem equal to the context.
> The implication that someone who's concerned about an arms race dynamic could simply opt out of the system that produces that dynamic is simply confused about what arms race dynamics are.
You can, in fact, opt out. You can opt out and do your damndest to stop what's happening, throw every cent you have at it, bend any ear that will listen, make use of the fact that your voice (as Anthropic leadership) has some meaningful weight.
If you really believe that we are heading down a path that's likely to end poorly for most or all of humanity, and you are the kind of person who's inclined to favor saving billions of lives over saving your own skin when the stakes are still relatively distant, abstract, and generally unclear, opting out is obviously on the table as a grand gesture that burns your position in the race to show just how fucking serious you are. The sense of inevitability your comment shares with many others does not seem well founded---we have, for instance, not had a global nuclear war yet. Leaders in the 20th and 21st centuries have shown remarkable restraint.
If today's political and tech leaders are unable to think beyond this inevitability, for whatever reason, the worst outcomes essentially become a self-fulfilling prophecy to the extent that reality bears them out.
---
But yes, these people are acting the way they are for obvious reasons, obviously. My previous comment is reacting to the general disagreement over whether Anthropic actually believes what they say about safety, etc., or whether it's a marketing gimmick. The purpose of my comment is to explain that "it's hard not to be cynical" about actions taken by very rich and powerful people that are claimed to be in everybody's best interests but are indistinguishable from the actions they would take to maximize their future power and wealth. I think everyone ought to agree with that statement. It's not a value judgment; it's simply an observation of how it feels to be on a plane whose pilot appears to be robbing the passengers (including you) at gunpoint and is conspicuously wearing the only parachute on board.
I'll mention again the nuclear analogy. It is, believe it or not, possible for great powers, and even adversary great powers, to agree to limit the development and proliferation of dangerous technologies.
> The main secret is out of the bag.
This is not something you can do in a shed with a handful of GPUs just because you know "the main secret". To build something like Mythos you need tens of billions of dollars, massive amounts of power, enormous buildings filled with specialized bleeding edge computer chips that are made by (optimistically) a handful of companies with deep government ties. You need free access to all the intellectual property that humans have created and posted openly on the internet. You need all of this at each step, and to take each next step you (or somebody) needs to have taken the previous one.
For now, there are a million ways for a government to pump the brakes on this cycle.
You were literally just criticizing Anthropic as disingenuous for begging for this. Or is your position that people other than those near the front of the race can agree to limit development? And if so: provide evidence.
Note also a key ingredient that makes nuclear non-proliferation possible is that they're pretty much useless weapons. There is no smaller order nuke that's dramatically more useful than a large conventional weapon. That's not true of AI models, which appear to be monotonically useful as they become more powerful.
What is the difference? It's easier to make money with the AI you get at each incremental step toward potentially destroying human civilization (though, of course, it's debatable whether these companies really are making money as such).
So what? You are implicitly arguing that human civilization will be unable to resist engaging in a large-scale, coordinated effort to destroy itself, just to make a few bucks along the way. Is this true? I don't know. The point of the nuclear analogy is that we have previously shown that we can, under certain conditions, put the eschaton back on the shelf for some period of time, despite very real pressure to take more incremental steps toward doom. "But AI can write code" is not a refutation of the possibility that we could take a more measured approach to AI development.
There may or may not be such a point with AI: A point at which ever smarter machines provides no marginal benefit to security. If that happens, I do expect agreements, should any one of us still exist.
There are billions of people who have opted out of playing the game. Has the game stopped? Has any game stopped because the people not playing it decided that it ought to? Only with government intervention, which is exactly what you just criticized Anthropic for being disingenuous for requesting.
Is your position that they should just be smart bloggers asking for regulation, instead of the preeminent lab asking for regulation, and that would be either more ethical or more effective? If it's less effective, isn't it de facto less ethical?
What say you about the thousands of smart bloggers asking for regulation who are ignored every single day and have no tools besides their blogs to steer the outcome?
> burn your position in the race to show just how fucking serious you are.
This is incredibly naive. Literally no one who is unconvinced of AI doom would be convinced by this... because they already don't believe the premise. Such a gesture would be readily explained away as "you were losing the race," or "you got rich enough already." This is the attitude when any individual opts out of participation (see: Hinton) and it's ridiculous to assume it'd be different if an entire company did it.
Not to mention, that an entire company can't do it. These companies have boards of directors. They are accountable to shareholders. A CEO who wanted to do this would simply be fired and the company would carry on. This is one of the key components of the trap. Large companies are not under the control of people but of incentives. They are literally deliberately designed not to be under the control of individuals –– to be immune to exactly the type of behavior you think is possible.
And yes, nuclear weapons are analogous to AI in the arms race dynamic to create and proliferate them. They are probably not analogous in there exists a stable equilibrium in nuclear weapons due to "accidents" of their nature. There need not be a similar equilibrium among competitive AIs.
----
And yes, your comment lands in exactly the category I mentioned. You do not believe the AI doom fears, so the behavior looks one way. I do believe in the AI doom concerns, so the behavior looks another way. This applies equally to yesterday's actions, today's actions, and tomorrow's, including some hypothetical honorable self-immolation to slow progress: I would see that as concordant with AI doom concerns, you would not. You would find it "hard not to be cynical" about the fact they already earned a ton of money, maybe was losing a bit of ground in the race, so on and so forth. This is plainly obvious to anyone who has had to converse with no-doomers, who can only analyze other people's behaviors under their own belief system, so it won't happen.
The only variable of disagreement is around AI doom.
> The only variable of disagreement is around AI doom.
The source of our disagreement seems to be your belief that somebody can either a) believe "AI doom" is inevitable, or b) not believe it's possible. This is an obvious false dichotomy that's stunting your ability to engage effectively with what I've written, and also stunting your ability to understand the broader landscape of the issue. You are projecting this dichotomy onto everybody involved and understanding their behavior in that way, which is leading you to make other reductive and honestly bizarre claims—like, for instance, the idea that a sudden change of course from Dario Amodei at this moment in time would be broadly perceived as somebody who was already losing the race cashing out his chips. If you really do believe that, I have to assume it's because you're modeling your hypothetical observers as falling into one of your two extreme mindsets and assuming Dario, being a smart guy who knows a lot, thinks the same way. I believe it is—yes, I'm ready for the dopamine hit—naive to assume all people or even most people fall into one of these two camps. Naive, at best. Yours is a self-limiting framework for thinking about this stuff.
I encourage you to broaden your thinking and engage in less projection and ad hominem stuff in discussions like this. I probably won't reply to whatever you post next unless you can do a better job writing a substantive reply to what I've written here.
I actually already know how you'd perceive Dario's opting out of the race because I already know how you perceive Dario's requests for regulation, which is the milder version of the same logic, and is vulnerable to the same cynical allegations of self-serving, which you've already expressed.
Because from the outside, their behavior looks like a situation of "What if Microsoft/Apple put controls in place to make it impossible to develop an operating system using their OS?"
Unlike nuclear weapons, advancing in this arms race requires actually deploying the product over and over again. Deploying the product makes your advancements visible to your competitors.
It makes complete sense to try to limit the degree to which that's true.
The nuclear 'race' was based on the premise that the winner could use it to destroy all other racers (a faulty assumption, see the USSR among others). I will charitably assume Anthropic does not intend to literally destroy anyone and merely wants to become an AGI monopoly. But if AGI is so powerful, any monopoly would not be stable since the incentives for entry into the market are massive. Why would China stop developing AGI just because Anthropic has it?
or is it more similar to the Cold War, where there were obviously competitors engaged in the race?
And yes, agreed the equilibrium dynamics for AGI are very different (and far harder to predict) than nukes. That sounds like a good reason to be sure we get there first since presumably any potential advantage wouldn't go to the second or third runner-ups
"Ability to literally destroy the other entity" is not a necessary or even typical feature of arms races.
It seems that the frontier labs believe they're participants in a winner-take-all market. Therefore they're in "an arms race."
Winner-take-all markets do not require that the winner literally destroys the losers, but only that the winner enjoys disproportionate returns compared to their actual superiority.
Whether or not this is actually true is TBD, but I think you're naive to think the frontier labs do not believe this to be true.
As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?
You're pretty explicitly saying that dominating the competition is not the type of "destruction" necessary to qualify as an arms race.
> As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?
Huh? Greed is – quite obviously – the major driving force behind the arms race. That is not a mitigation whatsoever.
> Whether or not this is actually true is TBD, but I think you're naive to think the frontier labs do not believe this to be true.
P.S.: On reflection, it's even worse than that, because it'd trigger based on anything the user types or reads on any site. Someone mentions a "critical rendering path" and now you can't participate on that thread in the Blender forums.
Let's just assume it was "only" that?
It's unreasonable to assume they are aiming to upset people who are just giving them money in the way they want. It makes no business sense, for any company. So that has to be a byproduct.
Model training is one of the more expensive undertakings in the world right now and distilling models from competitors against the TOS is apparently something that is going on for very little money. Why would they not "just" try to take measures against that?
All they had to do was have a simple, transparent output "Sorry, that request is against our terms of service. This session has been terminated"
The vast majority of frontier research is about how to build better models, not about alignment.
All this longtermism though is harmful. There are real problems of data theft, bias, labor displacement, and environmental costs that are happening right now but every push for regulation and regulatory capture, and all the safety talk, is always focused on some speculative future machine god to distract from the current problems.
I'd have a higher opinion of these labs if the issues they openly talked about and worked toward where the real issues we face currently, not speculative defenses against some future AGI that may never happen in my lifetime. I'm less worried about "our new model might kill all humans in the future" and more worried about how we are going to address anti-competitive behavior, copyright protections, labor rights, and the energy impact.
Honestly, that respect for 'copyright protections' has somehow become a leftist shibboleth is bizarre to me and indicative that something has become deeply warped in our discussions around this topic.
Frankly, this appeal comes across as the same kind of impassioned plea that a missionary might make when begging the faithless to repent and come to Christ before it's too late. This weird religiosity some people around here use to talk about AI, ASI and AGI is bizarre. Take what I've quoted and replace the words "progress" and "ASI" with "sinning" and "the Book of Revelations", and the zeal becomes apparent.
Outside of that though, there are other issues right now that need addressed before we speculate about what might be possible with ASI in the future. If the potential for a harmful ASI is truly that near, and that great, then why push forward at all? Where's the push for a global stop order on development of this technology until regulation can catch up?
The talk of a potential future serves as a distraction from the very real problems people are facing in their lives today.
While Dario and team are worrying about ASI, real people are worrying about how they are going to continue to feed their family after wide spread layoffs set a very large portion of the population back into a lower quality lifestyle. Real people are concerned about water usage is draught stricken areas, the massive energy demand driving grid instability in their communities, or that the environmental and economic externalities of model training is being socialized while the profits continue to be strictly private.
What about the mass proliferation of misinformation at scale having a real effect on our democratic process?
Forgive me if I'd like to see those addressed first, and fast, before we start worrying about an unpromised future technology.
That being said, I can't help but experience a bit of Deja Vu over arguments like those around biorisk. I've seen the same exact things said in the early 2000s over widespread access to broadband and Google. When the anarchist cookbook spread around online and everyone was super paranoid about democratized terrorism, and we had big regulatory pushes for ISP level censorship and user tracking. Telecoms frequently argued that only they can keep the web safe, with strict and expensive regulations that naturally only those large heavily capitalized companies can afford to go through. Like the early internet and search, its just another way to lower the latency required for a human to find already existing public data
Well, very little of that played out. Turns out the math, for now, is the same, and information retrieval doesn't directly correlate to democratized weaponization. In 2001, a bad actor still needed a physical lab, precursor chemicals, etc to build a physical threat. Those same exact physical constraints exist today. The software cannot yet cross the digital-to-physical divide.
Keep an eye on the risk, by all means, but I don't see it yet as justification to cement a monopoly or oligopoly, nor do I see it as a reason to prioritize a risk of information availability over the climate and environmental risks that are far more likely to end the species.
If you have a sizeable bucket of money, it's so, so easy to get folks so distracted by (or invested in) movie plot threats that they totally fail to (or have a "plausible" excuse to fail to) notice the actual, lasting harm that you're doing to society at scales both small and large.
If Anthropic had pushed hard and nonstop since their founding to ensure that all LLM companies in the world were legally bound to stop all LLM development the minute any one of them called for a halt to work, then I'd give their claims about safety some credit. They've been screaming about "safety" and "alignment" for years, but -because LLMs are impossible to secure against code injection- their products are fundamentally unsafe and always have been... I just don't trust their claims about a commitment to actual safety.
My read on their recent calls for a global "stop work" emergency cord is that they're very soon to (if they haven't already) reach a point where they will not be able to produce products that are sufficiently improved over the previous versions to justify the level of investment required for their development.
My prediction is that Anthropic and OpenAI will get serious barriers to entry of new competitors enshrined in Federal law, they will call for a "pause" or a "slowdown" in new research for "safety" reasons, and the US will attempt to engage in economic warfare with any countries that don't agree to force their domestic LLM companies to stop working on those LLMs.
unless the bitter pill is gone, extraordinarily not this. The capabilities will be limited by the training data we can create to pull information and patterns from
and then we will still be limited by compute, space, and power
mass devaluing of labour isnt particularly believable when everyones predicting that all the big labs are gonna go under trying to subsidize tokens.
power consumption and global climate change should
ASI should be in the top 10k concerns maybe, but way below what to eat for dinner.
much higher on the fears is some hype guy pretending he has made this thing, and giving it access to too much stuff, which it then randomly deletes or misuses
it should also be in thes same range as "what if the dinosaurs came back and ate everyone"
theres tons of progress on that too. same with finding aliens
there are real present concerns to worry about, like genocides, concentration camps for immigrants, food costs next winter, ongoing wars in the middle east and europe, etc
all kinds of actually pressing stuff, that doesnt first require burning a couple trillion dollars and forcing poor people to pay through the teeth for their electricity
Their concerns are probably real but I don't think they're being totally transparent about their concerns. They don't want to be subject to regulation (until they have captured the regulator) -- same as every behemoth.
In isolation it's not, but I think it's somewhat lazy to not talk about what they are trying to guard against, when we are supposedly giving the absolute maximum benefit of doubt.
Are we just concluding "their concerns were never real"? Because that probably runs counter the things that they have been observing and concluding.