Hacker News Reader

Comment by anilgulecha | Hacker News Reader

> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require.

Interesting - they're commiting to kickoff policy conventions to organize a world-slowdown of frontier LLM building. If they actually are able to crack it, this will give a much needed breather IMO. As exciting as the last ~6 months have been, there's some bigger questions to go answer now.

View on HN

We should be skeptical of any major player that advocates for regulating their own industry. In practice, this just means increasing barriers to entry and making it harder to compete with them.

In my mind we should be trying to push AI along the Linux trajectory. You have a free and open source product, developed by a decentralized team with a strong code of ethics, running on commodity hardware. There can still be trillion dollar industries built on top of it, but the core technology is democratized and available to everybody. I don't see how we get there if we allow a handful of companies to dictate where development of the technology goes.

The regulation that is being argued for here is against pushing the frontier. Entering the market with say a new speech to text model is not subject to such regulation. What's needed is something qualitatively different from entry barriers, and of the frontier model companies at least Anthropic and deepmind seem to have enough self-awareness to speak about it. They are finding themselves in a race with possibly catastrophic outcome for humanity and would like to stop, but it needs internation cooperation on a level that no single company can provide.

its a cartel looking to end competition though

the actual race is to keep having revenue, since everyone is still willing to pay more for the best model.

we as consumers of LLM models lose out by the arms race ending by the creation of a cartel

what happens if they get this regulatory capture is that all the frontier labs put effort into making inference cheaper, and become extraordinarily profitable, at the expense of us consumers, who really want better models, at a subsidized price

Wouldn’t this align with their financial interests? In theory the thing that’s keeping them from being profitable (or one of the big things) is the periodic capex expenditures of building new frontier models.

I don't think there's anything inherently bad about Anthropic making a profit. Red Hat makes a profit off of Linux. I'm interested in the democratization of the underlying technology.

I read this differently: they are actually seeing that it's hard to keep advancing frontier models, and now are moving the goal posts so that when they start getting evaluated more harshly, they can point to something like this.

Theyre probably looking to get a way to slow down the capex required to keep up, so they can be more profitable

> organize a world-slowdown of frontier LLM building

i don't want to be a negative nancy but i'm sure this "slowdown" will only be in effect until the infrastructure buildout is done or largely done. If they weren't hardware constrained there'd be no slowdown at all. Whoever gets there first wins everything ("there" being defined as AGI or a similar scale leap in capability).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com