Raised an eyebrow a little at this sentence: "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences."
We - as a humanity - collectively recognized the weight of our creation, and decided to walk back
Discussing “AI alignment” in the same breadth as aligning with a “Department of War” (in any country) is simply not an intellectually sound position
None of the countries we’ve attacked this year pose an existential threat to humanity. In contrast, striking first and pulling Europe, Russia, and China into a hot war beginning in the Middle East surely poses a greater collective threat than bioweapons, sentient AI, or the other typical “AI alignment” concerns
Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?
Because they’ve likely all lost faith in humanity watching Trump get reelected and now just want to get rich and hope to insulate their families from the reality we’re all living in.
We ran out of bombs actually. If there had been more bombs there would have been more bombings.
Had the bomb already been shipped, nothing about these delays suggests it would have instead been dropped before surrender instead of just delayed there. In reality, the pause sources from when Truman intervened immediately after Nagasaki (which was bombed on the 9th, Hiroshima previously on the 6th) by the 10th in hopes of unconditional surrender instead.
Had Japan not surrendered for some reason (they had more going south at the time than just the nukes) the US may well have dropped a 3rd bomb over another approach. That said, I'll give due credit to Truman that the activity was paused on hopes of surrender first rather than waiting for the next one to arrive.
I'm not saying the government can't overreach or over control, but if I or you or any of us were in charge of the defense of a country then we'd want to make sure technology from our country at the very least wasn't used to hurt us and if possible used to help us.
That's what alignment means and it's totally reasonable.
And even then you had politicians like Chamberlain in the UK who wanted to make peace because the UK wasn't directly threatened (this is after much of Europe was under siege).
"We both want a docile American public who go along with our desires so we can achieve goals that may be contrary to the interests of the American public."
This is not the forbidden love story I would've asked for.
I fear that frontier AI is going to be nationalised for military purposes, not just in the US but across the globe.
At the same time, I really don’t know what Anthropic were expecting when they described their technology as potentially more dangerous than an atom bomb while agreeing to integrate purpose-built models with Palantir to be deployed in high-security networks for classified military tasks.
My takeaway is that they are bending a knee to smooth things over. It’s business and it’s human behavior. They are actually furious and would love to tell Trump to crawl up his own ass, but that doesn’t help anyone in the long run. It’s in everyone’s best interest to get back to work and hope for the best tomorrow. It’s the adult thing to do. However, it's exactly why humanity is the shitshow it is right now. One side is trying to keep the world going by adulting while the other side keeps acting like complete fucking idiots.