These are companies with huge amounts of money invested in them. Their main responsibility is to their investors. If building better models (or making more money from the models they already have) would increase returns, they would do it. So they clearly can’t do it right now.
Climate change hasn’t stopped the oil industry, and concerns about forever chemicals haven’t stopped the chemical industry. Companies don’t usually give up profitable opportunities just because they might be harmful or kill us all in the long term..
Re the point on returning shareholder value, Anthropic is a PBC:
> Public Benefit Purpose: Under Delaware law, a PBC allows directors to legally weigh social and public good alongside maximizing profit for stockholders
Investors surely know this and Anthropic probably has pretty reasonable legal grounds to stand on if they chose to prioritize safety over profits.
Seems pretty clear to me that this is in earnest.
Snark aside, maybe I’m too pessimistic and you are correct on this. But.. doesn’t that mean we are completely fucked? If they don’t have any ulterior motive and they truly are panicking.. We should start packing.
Google has shown they are not motivated at all to push the bigger and bigger SOTA frontier with Mythos-type super models. Even OpenAI isn't really even trying to surpass Anthropic at the top of the market, preferring to keep pace in benchmarks but at lower costs to serve. Anthropic with Mythos is now more or less alone in aggressively pushing the ceiling for the most "super-intelligent" models current computing can support.
It has made them and their investors a gigantic pile of money, but we're really supposed to believe their contribution to that arms race (which they now describe as a threat to humanity) has always been completely altruistic and that their corporate structure inherently makes self-interested decision making impossible?
Why should we? Yes, reading the comments, it seems like the IT (or maybe it's just the AI) community has taken up an attitude of simply believing our Dear Tech Leader's by their word. What happened?
Because that would be foolish.
What part of public good is stealing giant corpuses from their owners and selling them back to them? People who show contempt for laws do so pretty consistently usually.
It's really sad that people fall for this stuff over and over again.
Please tell me models are not improving at breakneck speed.
They have an internal model which could solve a millenium problem end to end with no intervention, whereas current available models can't. They can clearly make better models. Not everything these guys say is some 500iq game theory optimal 4D chess PR or subterfuge strategy.