If you believe Anthropic believes what they say they do, all of it makes sense.
It's like a prisoner's dilemma where one party is loudly lecturing the other about the obvious benefits of cooperation while also obviously working on defecting. They want to have their cake and eat it too. Maybe they really are the pure-of-heart Chosen Ones destined to lead us around the great filter, but I don't see why I should believe that's the case when their behavior is just as easily explained as maneuvering toward being the winner who takes it all.
Yes, this dynamic is exactly the one that anyone who's concerned about AI is concerned about. I don't know why you state this as if it's evidence against the concerns lol. Someone being concerned about the incentives of a situation doesn't de facto make them immune to those incentives, obviously.
The implication that someone who's concerned about an arms race dynamic could simply opt out of the system that produces that dynamic is simply confused about what arms race dynamics are. The entire point is that it's a trap, and it's a trap even if you know it's a trap, and even if you don't like that it's a trap. There's nothing dishonest or hypocritical about being in the trap: it is literally a trap –– that is what it does and why it is bad!
I'm confused by these comments that imply people believe Dario et al are "pure-of-heart Chosen Ones destined to lead us around the great filter." Who? I've never seen it. And any AI-doomer is probably of the opinion that the entire question of Dario's or anyone else's personal moral character is 99% irrelevant. Because, again, it's a trap. The dynamics at play are so much larger than whether someone irks people for their lecturing tone. I would much rather give my money to Dario, who seems like a generally good person, versus Sama, who seems like a complete snake, but I'm under no illusions that doing so changes the fundamental dynamics that are steering us to AI doom. I doubt anyone does.
And yes, obviously they are angling toward being the winner who takes it all. That is literally the trap. If you believe what they believe, yelling "let's cooperate!" while hurdling towards the finish line and tripping your competitors is the only reasonable thing to do. That is the problem.
I think you're reading some subtext into my comment that I didn't intend. Knowing myself, I assume the scare quotes there are just a bit of casual irony re: the insanely high stakes here. The word "concerns" as used by previous commenters doesn't seem equal to the context.
> The implication that someone who's concerned about an arms race dynamic could simply opt out of the system that produces that dynamic is simply confused about what arms race dynamics are.
You can, in fact, opt out. You can opt out and do your damndest to stop what's happening, throw every cent you have at it, bend any ear that will listen, make use of the fact that your voice (as Anthropic leadership) has some meaningful weight.
If you really believe that we are heading down a path that's likely to end poorly for most or all of humanity, and you are the kind of person who's inclined to favor saving billions of lives over saving your own skin when the stakes are still relatively distant, abstract, and generally unclear, opting out is obviously on the table as a grand gesture that burns your position in the race to show just how fucking serious you are. The sense of inevitability your comment shares with many others does not seem well founded---we have, for instance, not had a global nuclear war yet. Leaders in the 20th and 21st centuries have shown remarkable restraint.
If today's political and tech leaders are unable to think beyond this inevitability, for whatever reason, the worst outcomes essentially become a self-fulfilling prophecy to the extent that reality bears them out.
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But yes, these people are acting the way they are for obvious reasons, obviously. My previous comment is reacting to the general disagreement over whether Anthropic actually believes what they say about safety, etc., or whether it's a marketing gimmick. The purpose of my comment is to explain that "it's hard not to be cynical" about actions taken by very rich and powerful people that are claimed to be in everybody's best interests but are indistinguishable from the actions they would take to maximize their future power and wealth. I think everyone ought to agree with that statement. It's not a value judgment; it's simply an observation of how it feels to be on a plane whose pilot appears to be robbing the passengers (including you) at gunpoint and is conspicuously wearing the only parachute on board.
I'll mention again the nuclear analogy. It is, believe it or not, possible for great powers, and even adversary great powers, to agree to limit the development and proliferation of dangerous technologies.
> The main secret is out of the bag.
This is not something you can do in a shed with a handful of GPUs just because you know "the main secret". To build something like Mythos you need tens of billions of dollars, massive amounts of power, enormous buildings filled with specialized bleeding edge computer chips that are made by (optimistically) a handful of companies with deep government ties. You need free access to all the intellectual property that humans have created and posted openly on the internet. You need all of this at each step, and to take each next step you (or somebody) needs to have taken the previous one.
For now, there are a million ways for a government to pump the brakes on this cycle.
You were literally just criticizing Anthropic as disingenuous for begging for this. Or is your position that people other than those near the front of the race can agree to limit development? And if so: provide evidence.
Note also a key ingredient that makes nuclear non-proliferation possible is that they're pretty much useless weapons. There is no smaller order nuke that's dramatically more useful than a large conventional weapon. That's not true of AI models, which appear to be monotonically useful as they become more powerful.
What is the difference? It's easier to make money with the AI you get at each incremental step toward potentially destroying human civilization (though, of course, it's debatable whether these companies really are making money as such).
So what? You are implicitly arguing that human civilization will be unable to resist engaging in a large-scale, coordinated effort to destroy itself, just to make a few bucks along the way. Is this true? I don't know. The point of the nuclear analogy is that we have previously shown that we can, under certain conditions, put the eschaton back on the shelf for some period of time, despite very real pressure to take more incremental steps toward doom. "But AI can write code" is not a refutation of the possibility that we could take a more measured approach to AI development.
There may or may not be such a point with AI: A point at which ever smarter machines provides no marginal benefit to security. If that happens, I do expect agreements, should any one of us still exist.
There are billions of people who have opted out of playing the game. Has the game stopped? Has any game stopped because the people not playing it decided that it ought to? Only with government intervention, which is exactly what you just criticized Anthropic for being disingenuous for requesting.
Is your position that they should just be smart bloggers asking for regulation, instead of the preeminent lab asking for regulation, and that would be either more ethical or more effective? If it's less effective, isn't it de facto less ethical?
What say you about the thousands of smart bloggers asking for regulation who are ignored every single day and have no tools besides their blogs to steer the outcome?
> burn your position in the race to show just how fucking serious you are.
This is incredibly naive. Literally no one who is unconvinced of AI doom would be convinced by this... because they already don't believe the premise. Such a gesture would be readily explained away as "you were losing the race," or "you got rich enough already." This is the attitude when any individual opts out of participation (see: Hinton) and it's ridiculous to assume it'd be different if an entire company did it.
Not to mention, that an entire company can't do it. These companies have boards of directors. They are accountable to shareholders. A CEO who wanted to do this would simply be fired and the company would carry on. This is one of the key components of the trap. Large companies are not under the control of people but of incentives. They are literally deliberately designed not to be under the control of individuals –– to be immune to exactly the type of behavior you think is possible.
And yes, nuclear weapons are analogous to AI in the arms race dynamic to create and proliferate them. They are probably not analogous in there exists a stable equilibrium in nuclear weapons due to "accidents" of their nature. There need not be a similar equilibrium among competitive AIs.
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And yes, your comment lands in exactly the category I mentioned. You do not believe the AI doom fears, so the behavior looks one way. I do believe in the AI doom concerns, so the behavior looks another way. This applies equally to yesterday's actions, today's actions, and tomorrow's, including some hypothetical honorable self-immolation to slow progress: I would see that as concordant with AI doom concerns, you would not. You would find it "hard not to be cynical" about the fact they already earned a ton of money, maybe was losing a bit of ground in the race, so on and so forth. This is plainly obvious to anyone who has had to converse with no-doomers, who can only analyze other people's behaviors under their own belief system, so it won't happen.
The only variable of disagreement is around AI doom.
> The only variable of disagreement is around AI doom.
The source of our disagreement seems to be your belief that somebody can either a) believe "AI doom" is inevitable, or b) not believe it's possible. This is an obvious false dichotomy that's stunting your ability to engage effectively with what I've written, and also stunting your ability to understand the broader landscape of the issue. You are projecting this dichotomy onto everybody involved and understanding their behavior in that way, which is leading you to make other reductive and honestly bizarre claims—like, for instance, the idea that a sudden change of course from Dario Amodei at this moment in time would be broadly perceived as somebody who was already losing the race cashing out his chips. If you really do believe that, I have to assume it's because you're modeling your hypothetical observers as falling into one of your two extreme mindsets and assuming Dario, being a smart guy who knows a lot, thinks the same way. I believe it is—yes, I'm ready for the dopamine hit—naive to assume all people or even most people fall into one of these two camps. Naive, at best. Yours is a self-limiting framework for thinking about this stuff.
I encourage you to broaden your thinking and engage in less projection and ad hominem stuff in discussions like this. I probably won't reply to whatever you post next unless you can do a better job writing a substantive reply to what I've written here.
I actually already know how you'd perceive Dario's opting out of the race because I already know how you perceive Dario's requests for regulation, which is the milder version of the same logic, and is vulnerable to the same cynical allegations of self-serving, which you've already expressed.
Generally, in the past when tech companies have made outlandish claims that were not backed by evidence, they're later found out to have lied. This is an ancient pattern going back to the dotcom era and before, but for recent examples you need only look back a few years to the web3 era. If they're not lying, they can show it by producing the results they claim. Until then, they're probably just lying.
> If they're not lying, they can show it by producing the results they claim. Until then, they're probably just lying
Brilliant framework: Anyone making claims about the future is not just speculating, not just wrong, but they are lying.
IMO they are using the cult messaging to distract the public so they take out all the oxygen in the room regarding people that care about the immediate impacts (climate exacerbation, ease of scamming, degrading job prospects, increasing income inequality).
Whenever real concerns are brought up against these companies they are always ignored while claiming the real concern is the fantasy of a machine god turning into skynet.
If they believe they're creating "a machine god" and that it's better it's their machine god than someone else's (which, given the other contenders, I tend to agree with), then all the corollaries you mention are mostly irrelevant.
Whether you believe they're creating a machine god is irrelevant. They believe that they are. It would be helpful if you could create an actually good argument for why they cannot or are not creating a machine god, but it turns out there are no good arguments for why it's impossible to do so. And so... they shall try.
Good to know.
Arms races always work out great for arms dealers. Less so for the average Joe.
Companies don't have to do that. If they're getting into actually dangerous territory, they can stop as soon as they want to.
If you don't believe that, or you don't believe that the frontier labs believe that, then sure, it makes no sense. But they probably do. The people at these companies literally dedicated their lives to building this specific thing that, up until people had to make tradeoffs between "that looks risky" and "that looks useful", virtually everyone agreed would be a dangerous technology.
What apparently many people on HN failed to appreciate is that the thing that makes it dangerous is the fact that it grows in utility.