Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.
Anthropic (and Deepmind, and some at OpenAI) believe the same thing.
Their ethical argument is:
1) This technology is coming whether or not our company does it or not.
2) Strong AI needs to be under human control, and we are the best placed to develop techniques to make this happen.
To be very clear: Anthropic (at least) is very happy to restrict access to their best models. They have continually campaigned for regulation to make sure others have to do the same.
> Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead
Personally I strongly reject the idea that labor displacement is unethical.
It will be a serious problem to deal with, but that doesn't make it unethical.
The steam engine displaced labor. That doesn't make it unethical.
Oh, well if you STRONGLY reject it I guess that's it.
> It will be a serious problem to deal with, but that doesn't make it unethical.
What WOULD make it unethical?
> The steam engine displaced labor. That doesn't make it unethical.
The steam engine also created new jobs to replace what it eliminated. It wasn't a mostly one-sided wealth transfer to the elite.
Indeed.
You make my point for me.
There's two big differences with the steam machine: this change is happening much faster so society has much less time to adapt, and it's got a much wider scope. Steam machines only replaced a small category of jobs.
So yea no it’s more like it’s important for industry leaders and those closest to model development to proactively identify the issues that they don’t have complete control over or that we don’t have a regulatory framework for.
Super puzzling to see these comments and of course with zero specifics just “they’re all liars and grifters”
- "It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea" (from the company that can't go more than a day or two without serious downtime)
- "We are releasing a model that is too powerful for the public"
- "It would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development."
- "I believe that biological risks may soon follow, and that serious AI autonomy risks may not be far behind."
You can fill my ear with nitpicks about there still being time for these cries of wolf to be born out, but be prepared for me to wax philosophical about all things being possible given an eternal timescale.
> Dario has been predicting the end of coding for a long time now and look where we already are.
Where? It seems exceedingly unlikely that developers have all been phased out while I wasn't looking, as Dario prognosticated. And even if they all up and disappeared, AI still hasn't found a toehold outside of the relatively niche market of agentic coding.
If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
It really does not matter how much they believed own doom predictions, because they were actively trying to make them true whether realistic or not.
These words make no sense. Anthropic delayed mythos/fable rollout. A mythos model without safeguards would have been a pretty bad idea, and they sacrificed a ton of revenue and risked being scooped by any of the other labs in the meantime. Frontier models are only frontier temporarily until the next lab releases their model. Of course they are a company and need to act in their own best interest.
It is also clearly serious the problems we need to think about as we march quickly towards even more capable systems. Why on earth is it a problem to point this out?
> If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
What a really weird take; they employ some of the best safety and alignment teams in the industry and this is an active area of research that they are campaigning for more attention on. You complain about them “doom trolling” and then complain they don’t do anything about…the doom? No sense at all.
It is perfectly consistent to (1) sound an alarm and (2) March full steam ahead as quickly as they can. If they don’t do (1) that’s unethical. If they don’t do (2) someone else will. I would rather someone like Dario align these models than the CCC. Plus it would be nice not to have a war over Taiwan which is inevitable if China gains enough of the upper hand in this AI race.
Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast
Predictions with wrong timing are frankly worthless. I predict at some point in the future the S&P 500 will be at 10,000. Of course I'm guaranteed to be right. But have I really predicted anything useful?
If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do.
And if you want to ask if Altman is trustworthy... ask Satya Nadella or anyone else who's ever made the mistake of doing business with him
How is a prediction a lie? Did they tell you "this will definitely happen in X time"? Their speculation is not only valuable (they are the closest to the technology) but also necessary (they need to buy long term compute contracts so these predictions are literally what they have to bet their real money and company success on).
They have said again and again that this will make an incredible amount of tasks obsolete, and they are of course right about this. The models _are_ dangerous to release, every time we hit the frontier. This has become _increasingly true_.
> Predictions with wrong timing are frankly worthless.
Who cares?
> I predict at some point in the future the S&P 500 will be at 10,000. Of course I'm guaranteed to be right. But have I really predicted anything useful?
You aren't cherry picking and strawmanning here? Should we have a tour of all of the things that have indeed been predicted well and already come to fruition? Was 2025 "the year of agents"? It very much was, wasn't it? Additionally, unlike the S&P, performance trajectory, for almost a decade, is incredibly stable and predictable. It's hard to know, a priori for a given task or category of tasks, what specific error rate will trigger a phase transition but it's absolutely obvious and clear that this will happen quickly. It has indeed happened quickly. Does 2026 coding look anything remotely like 2024?
> If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do.
No you're right he would make well reasoned arguments for the types of problems we need to address urgently. Hmm...that feels pretty ethical.
> If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do.
I don't feel either of them are trustworthy, they are CEOs acting in their companies best interest. But people suggesting Mythos delay was some sort of PR ploy is some of the most extreme mental gymnastics I've seen. I listen to the actual words spoken by these people and consider the hard data that is in abundance at this point. I listen to the large body of research on alignment and safety and measurement that anyone can read for themselves or use AI agents to digest for them.
Very smart people, reasoned arguments, “science”, all wrong.
But maybe this time will be different