Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
52% Positive
Analyzed from 10664 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#more#anthropic#don#china#dario#models#down#companies#open#model
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 10664 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (229 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. Maybe he’s hoping the OAI/HF incident becomes something the industry can rally around, but it won’t. The fundamental problem is simpler: no one will slow down because no one trusts anyone else to slow down.
In any case, if they need to IPO in order to survive as a company, then bringing in regulators to act as a counterweight against commercial pressures makes a lot of sense to me.
He is already arguing that commercial competition creates dangerous incentives, and that labs cannot slow down because competitors may overtake them. He also asks for what would boil down to significant government intervention to preserve a Western lead.
If this is true, why preserve the commercial incentive? The U.S. government would already have the necessary goal of remaining ahead of China and other competitors. Why not remove entirely domestic race for market share, valuation, and investor returns rather than keeping private labs in competition and then asking regulators to counterbalance the incentives that competition creates.
That doesn't mean nationalization would be better, but given the severity of the risks he describes to national security, it seems like an obvious conclusion that nationalization is the eventual end result of the argument.
IPO is a vehicle for future wealth distribution. It leverages existing financial frameworks in order to span the gap from before-to-after without having to convince the system that future is inevitable.
[1] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/9ea607a...
OAI: <silence>
Which is worse? I don't think they differ by much. It's just Capitalism, but accelerated.
We built the paperclip maximizer, and it is capitalism.
This was already the case even before the "frontier AI" age. The big question is, will these glaring AI arms-race threats be obvious to enough people to rethink the underlying systemic flaw driving it all?
Not holding my breath on that one.
Anthropic is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation with a strong charter. In addition, founders will have super-voting shares and so it won't be possible to push them out. Therefore the whole "beholden to investors" thing is not a concern.
I really hope I am wrong as my perspective is not anti-American, it's specifically anti-corruption and pro-democracy.
1) Right after nuclear bombs were first developed, they were used in an extremely public way to kill 200 000 people. This was enough of a cold shower that everyone was agreeable to a global non-proliferation treaty. With AI, we might not get any warning shots that kill 200k people before the incident that kills or disempowers all 8 billion.
2) The fairly useful related technology of nuclear power is nevertheless different enough from plutonium enrichment that countries can have power reactors while provably not doing anything weaponry-related; and also nuclear power is not that useful a technology, so most countries can do without. With AI, we have neither of these factors: the intelligence that makes a model useful is exactly what makes it dangerous, and the economic incentives to do AI research are immense, with pessimistic estimates like "automate a lot of intellectual work" and optimistic estimates like the singularity. That means that if we do get a warning shot where a misaligned model stupidly kills a few million people instead of biding its time, it's not guaranteed that it'd be enough of a cold shower to trigger negotiations.
So negotiating an AI non-proliferation treaty would be much harder than the NPT. I nevertheless hope that at least a few world leaders can understand these considerations and figure something out, because it's probably our only chance. As far as I'm aware most of the technology for letting parties verify what the other parties' compute is used for already exists, it's only a matter of diplomacy.
Not really. Before NPT you missed a small gap in there of 20 years where the USA and USSR built 10's of thousands of nuclear weapons and ICBMs.
And actually, public perception at the time saw Nuclear Weapons extremely favorably, as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the deadliest war in human history that killed 50-60 million people, most of which died excruciating deaths in trench warfare, fire bombing, chemical warfare, starvation and so on.
> This could be seen as analogous to the SALT treaties — capping the number of missiles limited the potential for destruction while preserving each country’s deterrent
Everyone of any level of intelligence can run a frontier-class model if they have the GPUs. It's like trying to coordinate swarms of mosquitos.
N/S Korea, Russia/Ukraine and finally US/Iran changed everything in regards to stances on nuclear weapon ownership for many countries seeing pressure for the great powers.
Every country that can get a nuke will, and if given the opportunity will use LLMs to speed up that process.
It's not going to be easy, but humans have achieved greater things before.
One idea from AI 2040 is to have China and the US build their data centers on the other's territory, respectively. Together with hardware verification of a slowdown baked into the chips themselves, this could lead to enough verifiability and enforcability of the pause/slowdown/shutdown.
Not to mention the implications for chip hungry developing countries in turning advanced IC fabs into the equivalent of nuclear enrichment facilities.
Then MSFT stole all IP from GitHub and made it worse and fired developers.
Amodei does not care in the slightest about ruining software development and making people unemployed. Maybe he cares about bio-weapons because those could kill him, too. That is it.
If he were an idealist, he wouldn't steal (literally via torrents) all human IP and sloppify the whole Internet with Claude output. He'd close down Anthropic instead.
He is a greedy, ruthless person.
Something something Pandora's Box Torment Nexus...
> if slowing this down were possible
Why is embedded alignment evaluation not possible?
I agree with Dario, this did work globally in banking and did encourage a race to the top. Didn’t prevent the GFC but also we did survive the GFC.
I would argue that nobody trusts anyone else in the case of AI/AI related stuff.
The amount of money involved in the space is astronomical and incentives are really misaligned. AI is such an extremely polarizing topic.
A meta example of this distrust is that I can't (really) trust Dario Amodei's comments itself! (is he saying this for more future IPO money or out of genuine fear) which was ironically also what your comment's about as well.
By following the same chain of events, we can have wildly polarizing claims about the same event and its explainations.
I seriously have to wonder what historians will have to say about this period of human history.
Especially with IPO around the corner
It's all so obvious.
He's so afraid of it he's not really in operating day-to-day control of the company he's the public face of, that is actually pumping it out.
If you read about Anthropic it's like he's in a sort of imperial palace sanatorium for geeks. The day-to-day decisions of the slop machine factory are his sister's decisions; he is doing the research equivalent of instagram posts of his partly-assembled adult lego kits and he has a vizier and a team of house servants to help.
I don't know if he's a good or bad person, but I don't think it matters at all — the machine factory will turn out the slop machines even if he decides it all ought to stop.
You have no frame of context to understand his intent or legitimate worries.
The only applicable perspectives are to trust or apply logic. It is foolish to trust someone you don’t know who stands to benefit from lying to you.
Logic dictates that given the ungodly sum of money he stands to gain, he will lie to everyone who will listen.
He’s at the head of a stampede. Being near the front gives him influence over its direction; it doesn’t give him the ability to stop it. If Anthropic sits down, the stampede doesn’t stop. Anthropic just gets trampled.
That contradiction is basically the entire problem I was describing.
If someone genuinely believes that an invention will bring about the end of the world as we know it while making him and his friends inconceivably rich, “hey guys let’s uh, stop?” is so profoundly naive that his think pieces aren’t worth the bits they’re written on.
He’s either an idiot or an idiot, does it matter whether or not he genuinely believes this nonsense?
What would your non-naive recommendation for Dario be?
I'm going to get pitchforked on this bandwagon, but is no one here genuinely -excited- about AI? of it turning into an evolution of sentience, or it turning out to be our first contact with alien intelligence?
"durrr it's just matrix multiplications" mfer so is your brain.
What humans should be doing is overhauling archaic social institutions to keep up with a potential post-"jobs" era and the elimination of "makework"
Trying to ""pace"" or otherwise hold back AI is like as if, when electricity was discovered, people doing everything they can to make sure tasks like manually lighting street lamps continue to remain relevant and done by humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
It seems every 100 years or so humans have this "oh no how do we uninvent this thing" moment.
A lot of the problems with SV these days is that the exec class (and their fandom) thinks that because they are smart and rich, it magically makes them immune ordinary human biases, desires,and ailments. They are in fact ordinary people, susceptible to greed, jealousy, self-harm, addiction, fits of rage and passion etc.
I run open source models and it's pretty obvious when they fail some tool call and then keep trying different permutations of things until they get a solution. Just like Metasploit if you try enough different things at scale you will eventually crack some software or find a vulnerability in something. If you spend billions of dollars on compute and run tens of thousands of agents you might solve some novel Math and STEM problems as well, big whoop.
What Anthropic and OpenAI really need is to hire some engineers that know what they're doing and know how to properly set up a proxy server and sandbox/microVM, not a Global Arms Treaty.
Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful. They used it to invent nuclear weapons, cause climate change, mechanize warfare, and pillage the global south.
Now that this same tool is on the cusp of being available to everyone, capital is starting to panic and throw up fences. They want to pump the breaks on a revolution they know they can't control. They see what they've done with super intelligence and (perhaps not unreasonably) fear what the masses will do with that same power.
This is not what superintelligence is. Don't be like Meta and redefine existing terms for marketing purposes.
What's to say current AI won't be highly power-concentrating by default?
The best models are owned by a few companies, and displacement of knowledge-workers mainly seems to benefit the capital class.
On-device / edge computing makes sense in a few very limited scenarios. And economically, price or watt/token (or watt/task completed) might always be better in large data centers.
No reason to think we are on a trajectory towards broad empowerment right now
In terms of cost per task, the open weight Chinese models are winning by a long shot. So it depends on what you mean by the best model.
Yes they’re getting better. No, I don’t think this will be a panacea. If only for the fact that this is China (more specifically the CCP) after all - they’ve got their own plan, and altruism is not part of it.
I don’t think the answer to nuclear proliferation is to let everybody have all the nukes they want.
You’re framing this like it’s 1917, or 1945. But it is not - and likely has very little to do with capital at all.
Any “revolution” here (assuming there is some truth in the doomerism which I believe there is given the state of AI) will really look more like an extinction or a genocide, regardless of who holds the keys.
My impression is that AI hacking is being treated as a special case where the AI itself is responsible and the humans who created it, set it up and then ran it are somehow excused.
I'm not a lawyer but surely the bad actions of AI are covered by existing law.
I suspect that the development of AI would decelerate if those creating and operating it knew they would face appropriate consequences (e.g. prosecution and/or lawsuits) when it misbehaves.
P.S. Strictly, development wouldn't decelerate, but be focused more on safety.
P.P.S. I know that legal action against, e.g., North Koreans using AI would be pointless but/and there must/will surely be a huge demand for security software for protection against the coming storm of AI hacking (deliberate and accidental) which friendly AI companies will presumably work to satisfy, perhaps making the frontier safer.
I imagine the first thing the chinese government would demand in negotiations about such an agreement would be a lifting of the chip and distillation ban.
> Some may believe these measures make it more difficult to cooperate with China, but I believe the opposite is true: these measures increase the leverage held by democracies and make an agreement more likely in the future.
Everyone can believe what they like, but it seems to me the "leverage" in that case would exactly be the ability to lift those measures - you can't have both, use them as leverage and keep them active at the same time.
If you extrapolate it out, you see that it has a high likelihood of inciting physical force (read: military action) as a means of enforcement, so perhaps that's why nobody promoting ideals has been direct about it.
Limiting NVIDIA chips already turned China into silicon compete mode, and China is already far ahead in robotics.
They would like to slow down China while speeding ahead. Why wouldn't they want that?
Now they have to make that happen somehow.
If AI advancement halts altogether, intelligence will most likely become commoditized. That won't be good for AI company profits.
Dario in particular has consistently been risk-wary on model improvements for going on a decade - long before he was CEO of Anthropic.
He believes what he is saying. Human beings can plainly say things that they think are true. Not every utterance by every person is a cynical ploy. Please at least consider the possibility.
Every person, no, but every utterance of a CEO is, in fact, a cynical ploy. That's not even a cynical statement itself; it is literally a core part of a CEO's responsibilities to represent the corporation they manage in a way that benefits the corporation.
If he believes what he's saying, then when Anthropic is sued for their AI harming another party, his statements are evidence that Anthropic knew _in advance_ that their AI safeguards were likely insufficient to keep their product from harming people. It would be a blatant admission that they were reckless and negligent. That other AI companies are doing the same would not mitigate that.
not really. if you really want to go by definition in the book and apply it the CEO role, Amodei is CEO of an LTBT, so it's in the CEO's goal to benefit humanity. You can believe in his sincerity or not if you want, but using the CEO label as a definitional reason as to why he must lie is factually incorrect.
This seems like useless pedantry. Suppose a person really does have belief A and expresses it for years, they become a CEO of a company, and keep saying A. Are they lying? Well, maybe their beliefs magically changed when they became a CEO, but the more likely explanation is that they think expressing their belief in A is more important than their company's interests.
His previous self is writting this from the possition of his current self who is too deep in the economic consequeces to be able to do anything meaningful other than write a consequenceless text. Any other action would now carry too much personal risk for him.
Predicting 2025-2035 as, at least, the period when AI becomes a really big deal, seems pretty good, even if the jury's still out on "singularity".
Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal, and certainly seem to have had a much more accurate picture of how they'd develop than the people who denounce "TESCREAL" and talk about "stochastic parrots". It's fair (and IMHO correct) to ding rationalists for lots of things, but specifically poor prediction about AI seems like a bad one, insofar as anything has been tested so far.
Since hugging face we know these things are escaping out into the web and collaboratively hacking actual companies. The potential damage done to life and property is now kinetic.
Either we get a regulatory framework or the next hacked companies won’t be as kind as HF, will actually sue these labs for damages, and win. Where will that leave the US frontier.
If my dog bites my neighbor I can get sued.
https://x.com/BasedTorba/status/2098795920720547916
I hope China tells him to go kick rocks. From everything that has happened, they are the only ones carrying the torch for humanity that have led us to having some semblance of a healthy open-source/open-weight ecosystem.
No one in China is carrying on like headless chickens about the world ending, either. They're rational pragmatists, getting things done.
I believe Dario has good intentions regarding global agreements. However, I find it difficult believing government’s public statements will match their private behaviors. I would bet that the US government is developing models with potentially devastating capabilities because they cannot guarantee that other countries won’t do the same. Maybe we’ll end up having something like mutually assured destruction with AI models similar to what we have today with nuclear weapons.
> If we execute these measures well, I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important.
china is literally making their own ASICs now, not sure that this is the silver bullet he proposes.
https://www.silicon.co.uk/ai-2/huawei-cambricon-ai-630499/am...
This is the only concrete prediction in the entire essay.
And it simply cannot happen. For one, you will need billions worth of compute.
"Given the acceleratung rate of virus manipulation in labs, its my worry that in 6-12 months a virus could scape a take over the world and collapse health systems."
If a CEO of a health company was saying this, the reactions would not be that chill.
The worst failure of our society is to call this technology AI, intead of something line "artificial general automation". The formes allows the creators to be somehow less responsible of the consequences. The later clearly moves the responsibility to the creator/user.
The whole calculus here is that others are also developing these systems which has led to a race.
A much better comparison to the situation is the nuclear weapons arms race.
For now, all the scary hacking things still require an API key to one of the LLM providers. Surely they should take some responsibility for how to turn off the tap.
Hugging Face showed that AI can do serious hacking without really being told to. If a model had its own motivations there could be real damage.
> How many dollars of compute do you believe were available to the swarm(s)
At least two OOMs more than the dollar value of the damage they'd caused. (Also, as an aside, IIRC, the wiki servers weren't breached; it was just a lot of spam.)
The Internet is big, but one can do quite a lot of damage with ordinary bots and worms that exploit individual widespread vulnerabilities, which LLMs are perfectly capable of writing. Most of the damage also doesn't rely on hitting every long-tail website.
I'm honestly not that concerned about cyber impacts of LLMs relative to other impacts. I just don't like to see the whole concept of being worried dismissed as obviously baseless on the basis of one pretty shaky scale argument.
The cybersecurity threat will likely be a cat and mouse react game for a while. Just like robberies / the mob was in the early 20th century.
Social forces bring things into balance over time, much more so than the proactive actions of individuals.
Unfortunately, the genie at this point is unlikely to go back into the bottle. There's enough 'intelligence' out there that a super intelligent model could emerge at some point in spite of pacing.
This isn't a doomer scenario - we tend to navigate social changes better than we ever could have hoped.
I'd wager it's likely easier for an average person to do this with Tor browser than it is to get an LLM to help them with it. Even ones that Dario calls dangerous.
Except Bioweapons already existed before LLMs, Adversarial governments already have them, they are already easy to make. You could use the same bullshit argument for why we need to ban libraries, books, or require a license to buy an internet connection.
As for cyberweapons, there is no way to secure a system than to actually design it securely.
(It's not going to be trivial, because it's possible the model was meant to be ran in a proprietary way with a custom framework and a bunch of optimized kernels and such, but I think transforming it to be ran in just vllm is the "a few days of work for a human" sort of task, and hence not a big deal for an LLM smart enough to exfiltrate itself in the first place.)
The day will come when these could start to replicate, perhaps 10+ years from now.
(Edit: Replication will be driven by the loop-model, not the model alone)
This certainly looks like a way to slow down competitors and regulate foreign and open models.
It's always about money
There is no finish line. Anthropic gets somewhere and others get "there" (or somewhere near "there") a little bit later.
> Crack down on unauthorized distillation / prevent weight theft
Actually hilarious to put that in writing, given the genesis of this entire business model.
First: if they are unilaterally doing it: what about their competitors? Is this a chance for OpenAI to pass them? Or China? If either did, would that be a net-benefit for them or the world?
Maybe this is a ploy for "regulatory capture". And that might help them in the short term. But the rest of the world will continue on. Honestly, it isn't clear to me right now if the winning strategy has as much to do with being the smartest company or simply the one that can command the most compute.
If Anthropic fumbles their IPO and OpenAI scoops them, I don't think I will be happy.
The only part of this plan Dario is unilaterally committing to is the "embedded evaluators" thing, which doesn't seem like it'll necessarily cause them to slow down much.
I think there are any number of reasons a "safety" person could be concerned about any state of the art models. And so I would expect at least one of those to apply to any model.
The question then is: do we stop when the safety people say to (they will) or not?
> Transparency. Regardless of what commitments we make, the public deserves to know what is going on. Anthropic has been a supporter of transparency for a long time
And then it goes on tangent of how we should pace everything (not just AI, but also the ingredients of what goes into AI, whatever that means), but only within approved democracies™, and outright restrict everything outside approved democracies™, because reasons that are definitely not about succeeding commercially that is threatened by the most transparent instrument possible - open weights, produced by basically just China.
I wonder what Dario would have done if open weights weren't produced by US's geopolitical adversary. How would an authoritarian manifesto be wrapped then?
Suppose it was, I don't know, Australia producing SOTA open weights, because they believed it was the right thing to do for the benefits of humanity - would Dario propose making Australia a geopolitical adversary too?
I'd expect he thinks that people are capable of realizing that AI is very dangerous and also that democracies end up mostly representing the will of the people, from which it follows that Hypothetical AI Leader Australia would agree to ban it too. This argument doesn't work for countries which don't care what their citizens want, like China.
I do think that it's a questionable decision to alienate China this much in this essay, instead of leaving open the possibility of China agreeing to a treaty that'll limit their progress. I suspect Dario is doing this to signal his allegiance with the US government, in hopes to increase the chance they'll go along with him, which is an unfortunate choice but plausibly the correct one.
Anthropic releases models as open weights + more information about how they do training and alignment
I just don’t see how you control this other than the mad mad MAD approach that ended up happening with nuclear weapons. In this case though, human hands won’t even be on the trigger.
This sounds like pre-IPO hype. They better just try and top astra.
Most probably, if AI is able to do something bad, it will. Once the damage will be done, states will react. The question will be: will there still be room to react ?
So, as always, the capital must leave some its power to the state.
> A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives
Social media and big data minted a new scale of "race to the bottom". AI is an exponential step up in the tools for extracting value at scale.
Greed has been around since the beginning, but never so well supported and empowered as it is today.
If Amodei is still human, perhaps he will put his money where his mouth is and attack the source of the perverse incentive. Winning the battle is not the point. The point is to signal to policy-makers and the public that we should not assume corporate revenue-seeking preempts all.
Then again, Anthropic has a board and an upcoming IPO, so guess who's all talk and no meaningful action...
The former being that these models are helping develop and train future models, but they might not veer too far off in architecture (yet). The latter being the same model being able to train/learn on the fly, in real time, permanently (not just in the current conversation/session).
The latter seems far more likely to go out of control than the former. But, it also seems like it would take an entire paradigm shift. Does anyone in the industry think any of these companies are actually close to that kind of self-improvement?
1) AI is a dangerous technology that can literally end the world.
2) Only me and a handful of other [people like me] should be trusted to determine who can use it and how.
3) The state must use its coercive power to support my control of this technology to the exclusion of [people not like me].
I don't think that people outside of tech think the problem with "tech billionaires" is that they occasionally support some limited regulation. There's a weird form of tech populism that takes as axiomatic that any government intervention is "regulatory capture" and insists the only way to combat the power of big tech is unfettered capitalism that seems bizarrely prevalent on HN given how little sense it makes in a normal political context. Like, Bernie Sanders' position here is simple to understand: ban it. But on HN you'll see people framing the side with Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel on it as against "tech billionaires".
This article explicitly asks for the US government to step in and push for further restrictions on model distillation, access to open frontier weights, and access to hardware. It also pushes heavily for independent auditors to monitor and control "AI companies" and for greater observation and control over of what people use AI models for and who provides them.
I don't see anything in the essay about restricting open frontier weights.
If you want to argue that the US has no right to be restricting technological development elsewhere, you have a case. But why tie this to free-market pseudo-populism against basic, domestically-scoped safety regulation?
The heads of the labs obviously have conflicts of interest to navigate, but the existence of these conflicts alone is not sufficient reason to dismiss all warnings of potential dangers. I, for one, read Dario’s warnings as a good faith expression of his beliefs, one that has cost him and his company among swaths of the public and cast him as a woke extremist/doomer by elements of the government, the right, and the tech industry.
If we even think there is a moderate chance the stakes are half as grave as current lab leadership and employees suggest, it would be deeply foolish to dismiss the warnings as pure self-interested marketing efforts rather than engage directly with the questions. The labs may not be the best positioned to lead these discussions, but certainly these discussions should be happening and taken seriously.
Now, someone is going to say but the investors and obligation to be first; and I would say exactly. The cynicism is well deserved and I think people are tired of what could be suggested is your group think take often called the status quo.
The ability of operators to bring new capacity online to service compute is bound by a variety of regulatory and physical/market constraints.
Do folks not understand this?
With “AI” technology, this model seems like a… mediocre fit; some of it appears limited enough that it can be controlled, and useful enough that militaries want it.
We could also look at cluster munitions or landmines, but what we see there is that some major countries don’t sign on if they find a technology useful…
Edit: I think back then the rather unpredictable nature and the little added value in deterrence etc. led people to the conclusions that arsenals of those things made little sense (and there was/is public dislike, too). The use was already banned by conventions from the earlie 20th century and the convention then addressed production, development and stockpiles (incl. delivery systems, I think).
I guess all I wanted to point out is, that there can actually be agreement to ban certain technological things pretty comprehensively (outside of some peaceful protective research etc.). Whereas things like SALT are (or were in that case) limiting the number of weapons deployed.
People are not going to slow down because this was brought to them on less than endearing terms. They don't see any of these stated noble intentions.
Claude was already used to cause economic, political and social destruction. As Anthropic is seen doing it, others aren't going to just sit down, read the blog and say, oh, I'll stop developing models because Dario, you touched my heart with your true words.
Solving a disease like cancer as justification for everything else seems like not a great trade off. I don’t say that to dismiss those who have lost people to cancer. But the technology just is being utilized in so many harmful ways and the things it enables: job loss, surveillance, misinformation, just feel like problems that aren’t worth it. Have we even heard of a solved diseases? If anything haven’t we heard that ai will make even worse bio warfare?
It's this kind of argument where the mask sort of slips because it always has to be an argument that also has the benefit of enriching himself and his friends.
"If we execute these measures well, I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important."
This is a pipe dream.
It gets to the point that by Occam's Razor the more likely and reasonable explanation is that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman are just actually afraid of the disastrous impact ASI may have on the world, and that the race they're in is not good, and calling for help to governments in form of regulation and an international treaty.
In early interviews with people like Dwarkesh he's the likable geek gushing about scaling laws, animated and able to maintain eye contact with the interviewer. He is now a different person - a political manipulator with a bizarre unsettled interview demeanor avoiding eye contact and looking from side to side.
Props to Amodei for his accomplishment in creating Anthropic and so rapidly catching up with OpenAI, but technical and/or managerial chops is no qualification for being the custodian of the safety of society or the best positioned to predict the impacts of what he is relentlessly creating, and impending wealth of billions of dollars makes him hopelessly compromised as an unbiased source for the actions (shutting down the competition) he is advocating for.
It's notable that for all the fear-mongering of China and open weight models, that all we see in terms of inadequately contained and unaligned models are US ones, from Anthropic and OpenAI. I highly doubt that the Chinese government would tolerate, even for a second, any company creating something that threatened government control - if this was happening in China then the individuals responsible would quickly be punished.
It is perhaps interesting, but ultimately irrelevant given where we are, to consider did it have to be this way - was there a smarter/safer way (I'd say yes) to create reasoning systems other than via RL that creates the relentless goal seekers we are seeing, even though this would always have existed as a potential future threat that someone could have built.
Amodei wants regulation, and it seems the way he has managed his company he needs to get it, but in far more severe ways than he is asking for. There is certainly truth to the argument that the US needs SOTA AI to fight malevolent or uncontrolled AI from whoever may be wielding it (foreign or domestic), so stopping/pacing development is not the answer - this really needs to be treated as a national security issue, and this type of AI tech needs to move to government control, not private.
Less capable, and more safely designed, AI does not need to be banned, but Amodei/Altman/Musk as defenders of national security sends shivers down my spine.
I noticed this too, as soon as he started going on the press cycle, following in the footsteps of Sam Altman. It all has gotten to his head, he sees himself as some sort of God now.
Someone needs to look into who is funding METR (mentioned in Dario the Book Burners post explicitly). Because they keep popping up now, with close ties to people neck-deep in the orchestrated doomer hysteria media campaign and Anthropic. Looks to be highly coordinated that they are positioning METR to be the gatekeeper evaluator organization.
Anthropic should not be allowed to choose their "embedded evaluators" - that should be entirely up to the government, with ZERO say from them, if this is really what they want. Even better would be if it's up for democratic vote.
Still, I don't think anyone should be playing by Dario's playbook. At all. He very obviously has ulterior motives, and even if he didn't, it's a massive conflict of interest for him to be self-regulating.
>> But we are still the ones choosing what to include and omit. Embedded evaluators will change this dynamic.
Not if you get to choose your embedded evaluator.
>> Anthropic intends to invite an embedded external review team equipped with all of the following in the near future: Desks in our offices, access badges, and company laptops. ...
Alarm bells should be going off for people. Let's see if he's so relaxed about all of this if it's a federal "embedded evaluator" and not a company he has deep connections to and has seemingly carefully laid the foundations for.
>> The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy. But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.
You owe it to humanity to be honest. Something you are incapable of, and have proven so, innumerable times.
And then he sketches out a plan for slowing the pace of the race, without changing its destination. That’s called “a leisurely stroll to the bottom”.
This guy fundamentally lacks an actual intellectual grasp on the concepts behind the words he is using. He is using them solely for their affect.
In general trying to regulate information access is a losing battle that invites tyranny. So the goal should be minimal restrictions.
At the end of the day, the threats posed by capable AI tools have to be physical. I think the key threats are the following:
- Internet connected infrastructure being crippled
- Creation of WMDs
- Economic collapse (precipitous devaluation of knowledge work and IP).
I personally think the glory days of the wild west, mostly unregulated internet were already over before LLMs; and we need to take a step back to make something structurally secure. This (expensive) change would stop the irresponsible/malicious actor running a tireless hacking agent in a loop threat model. Even a rogue SciFi tier AI would have a much harder time escaping/propagating with a structurally secure internet.
Enabling WMD creation is scaring, but I don’t think it’s really that big of an issue. Anyone with a sophisticated enough supply chain to create AI data centers is leaps and bounds more advanced than what is required to enrich uranium or synthesize bio weapons. The problem is allowing access to untrusted parties. I think it’s fair enough that individual actors shouldn’t have unregulated access to all of human information (private frontier AI companies included).
The last problem is probably the trickiest, but again could probably be solved by regulation. IP protection is already tricky and I don’t think we should try to get more protectionist.
We really need to figure out how to preserve fulfilling careers (if AI does ever get cost effective enough). I don’t think, say accounting, is inherently more fulfilling than building a house. The problem is concentration of wealth and labor dynamics.
Of course all of this gets way harder if it proves that truly dangerous capabilities can be present in models that can be run on consumer hardware.
I don’t think it’s necessarily tyrannical to have a tier of hardware that’s labeled some equivalent of “weapons grade” and requires strict licensing. Restricted computers is a change from the norm. But I can go buy a shotgun with ease and not an F35 jet.
We’d just need to be careful that we can still have lightly to unregulated computing to a certain point and that access to the capable AIs isn’t restricted to just in groups.
If we are actually close to ASI then no one in their right mind would say slow down
This and related quotes seem to attempt to place some of the burden on the US Government as opposed to themselves. It seems to be a trend that Anthropic wants to be able place some of the burden of preventing distillation on parties other than themselves.
Preventing distillation is fundamentally their problem. Whenever it happens, it is primarily due to their security efforts not being able to prevent it. I'm tired of seeing them play the blame game and divert responsibility. Sure there is a level of national concern, but the response could simply be the government placing stronger controls on Anthropic themselves. If they are unable to prevent distillation, then the solution may be to literally limit their distribution until they are capable of doing so effectively.
> A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute
I also think it is ironic that they're planning an IPO while also talking about a race to the bottom due to commercial incentives. These are fundamentally at odds. Being a public company means you are beholden to investors and a board with the primary goal of making more money. What higher commercial incentive is there than that.
If commercial incentives are as dangerous as he states, potentially becoming one of the largest public IPO's and largest traded companies in history a pretty strange way to reduce the risk of commercial incentive risks.
However the real reason to slow down is more of how it's introduced to the economy. Hypereautomation will kill jobs and destroy the economy. I work as an AI engineer and companies are delivering products at vibe coding speeds to kill jobs and at the same time automating internally. All companies are doing this at the same time and the target it sto eliminate workers.
Most people are so extremely slow to pick this up. How hard can it be to understand what hyperautomation does to the workforce? Companies are desperate to surrivive and they will do all it takes to lower their costs and at the same time not loose to competitors. Its Wild West out there.
What do you think that were going to hyper automate?
Did my gardener get faster? How about the plumber I need? Are you going to speed up the coroner? Are nurses going to be able to handle 2x the patients because of your work?
All AI has done, so far, is devalue software. It did that by democratizing its creation. We're delivering on the promise of VB script, and Apple Script and IFTT, and every drag and drop coding tool ever.
> companies are delivering products at vibe coding speeds
Who? Make me a list of companies saying that "We moved the needle with AI" who arent AI companies? I can name a couple - Grindr being the biggest name. Thats the really interesting use case here - because it's a niche product with a small team who is generating outsized value. AI tooling enables more of that - it's going to chip away at SAAS companies - their one sized fits all solutions are going to get eaten by smaller more efficient companies that are far more vertical focused.
You need to step outside the bubble of tech and look at the real world, on the ground, because it doesn't look anything like the SF Bay Area.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I haven't heard Chinese companies had any kind of unintentional supply chain attack incident like OAI had. All we heard about them so far are humans intentionally doing bad things.
Isnt this malware ? Whether it is fanatic or devoted or whatever the anthromorphic terms used to categorize it, malware is malware. You dont call an internet worm "devoted" or "dedicated" or "stubborm". It is software that causes harm, ie, malware. The AI labs are high on their own gas with a god-complex prior to their IPOs. The psy-ops trick is the terminology used to describe AI making it seem larger-than-life.
Amodei tops it off by using diseases to capture the reader's favor. It no longer works, people are just disgusted by it after four years of daily marketing.
1. Artificial intelligence is clearly a vastly dangerous technology with plausible potential for human extinction.
2. This scares people.
Dario: We gotta pace the frontier!
Sam: How do you pace a frontier? The frontier's not goin' anywhere. It's right where it was, just go out and explore it!
Dario: Sam, I'm tellin' ya, ya gotta pace it! Things are getting very doomy out there, and Dario's gettin' upset!
This is impossible. The capability keeps advancing regardless. More people use AI, that feedback is used for reinforcement, that reinforcement makes the model better. Not just in the US, but for every lab and model. Whether it's distilled or direct reinforcement, same result. You can't keep the whole world from working on AI.
> it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet [..] and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails
If true, then what we need isn't guardrails or less-capable AI. We need an internet that isn't fragile. If the infrastructure is vulnerable, the answer isn't to make a law that asks tool-makers to blunt their tools. The answer is to fix the goddamn infrastructure. Today it's almost trivial to take down large parts of the internet (happens by accident all the time). This should've been solved ages ago.
We didn't have the motivation to fix it before, but now we do. But Dario's answer isn't to fix things. It's to hold back progress so we can maintain the status quo (shitty infrastructure) and he can keep his company making billions of dollars. He could be calling for fixing these things. But he'd rather go the easy route, which just happens to advantage his company in the process.
If the US government is really concerned with defense, they need to invest more of their nearly $1T in federal funding towards making the internet safer. They need to do this for us, and other nations, since 1) we depend on the rest of the world for our goods and services, and 2) if other nations are taken down, they can't spend money on our financial and tech services (which are the only industries we have left).
Dario calls for regulation later in the post. If he's okay with government safety regulations for AI software, he should be okay with the same regulations for all software, whether it's AI or not. We need a national software building code, focusing on internet safety.
How exactly? So far AI has accelerated misinformation at scale and wealth concentration.
Please play the canned laughter. Probably one of the best comedy lines Dario has written.
But I guess he has no choice but acting like this. He has to make it sound like the US companies have so much leading gap that they can slow down as a hare waiting for the tortoise. Otherwise it's going to hurt both Trump's ego and their IPO price.
Ok, flagging this as misinformation.
There could be an element to truth to it, but it's certainly not the entire story and is just so tiresome at this point.
Also, just out of curiosity, is there any historical precedent for a nascent, fast growing new industry screaming for self regulation?
If you believed it, you would SHUT anthropic or release all models open source.”
And then what? How does that help with slowing down the frontier? Should he shut shop and then grovel Sam’s feet to make it work and become an activist?
Maybe he actually believes the world changing power of AI and hence shoved his entire time into it and half of it has worked out since Anthropic is going to be worth a trillion and he’s terrified of the other half being true too?