State your accusation plainly: you think that Anthropic is spending a double-digit percentage of its headcount on pretending to care about catastrophic risks, in order to better fleece investors? Do you think those dozens or hundreds of employees are all in on it too? (They aren't; I know a bunch of people at Anthropic and they take extinction risk quite seriously. I think some of them should quit their jobs, but that's a different story.)
I’m sure these people are very serious about their work - do they actually know how far we are - technologically, spend, and time wise from real non word generating AGI with independent thought processes?
It’s an amazing research subject. And even more amazing a corporation is willing to pay people to research it. But it doesn’t mean it’s close in any way, or that anthropic would reach that goal in a decade or 3
I would compare spending this money and hiring these people to what Google Moonshot tried to do long ago. Very cool, very interesting, but also there should be a caveat on how far away it is in reality
I don't see Anthropic making very confident claims about when they're going to achieve AGI (however you want to define that). Predicting how long it'll take to produce a specific novel scientific result is, by its very nature, pretty difficult. (You might have some guesses, if you have a comprehensive understanding of what unsolved dependencies there are, and have some reason to believe you know how long it'll take to solve _those_, and that's very much not the case here. But if you're in that kind of situation, it's much more likely you're dealing with an engineering problem, not a research problem.) Elsewhere in the comments on this link, their CISO predicts a 50% chance of hitting capabilities that'll trigger their ASL-3 standard in the next 6 months (my guess is on the strength of its ability to find vulnerabilities in open-source codebases). That's predicting the timeline for a small advancement in a relatively narrow set of capabilities where we can at least sort of measure progress.