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Comment by badatnames | Hacker News Reader

I can't remember the last time (if ever) a company managed to go from golden goose to.. whatever this is.. so quickly. The permanent defensiveness in his presentation is really hard to swallow, it actively puts me off wanting to believe in or rely on their product line with Dario at the helm. I don't even understand the logic leading up to this post. Who was it even hoping to convince. Is it possible Anthropic is due an oil change?

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Anthropic has been surprisingly bad at comms for the last few months, which I find crazy in such a competitive market.

Current big picture reality is bad for comms unfortunately. As another commenter quoted, "You can put lipstick on a pig, it'll still be a pig". Cuban Missile Crisis wasn't very calm. Do you think a company this well-capitalized and smart is just bumbling around like idiots? Everything makes sense if one just actually entertains the idea that they are earnest and we are in a dangerous arms race

> Everything makes sense if one just actually entertains the idea that they are earnest and we are in a dangerous arms race

That would require me to ignore the benign reality of open LLM proliferation, so naturally most people will see this as a manipulative lie.

I feel everyone running these companies has stopped caring what the public think. It's all about selling their vision to politicians now. Which is also why they try to tie everything with "national security" — the average joe hears it and thinks about forever wars in the Middle East, the average congressman hears it and approves whatever solution is suggested.

Yes, but the strategy is a lost cause as we're seeing.

In virtually any other situation, companies would be able to successfully grease politicians. The problem for AI companies is they spent the last several years broadcasting that their tech is going to take everyone job, and consequently their livelihood.

No matter how much you bribe a politician, you can't hold and maintain elected office when the voters overwhelmingly do not want something.

I find “bad at comms” to be such a cop out. As if it’s saying that the company is so troubled and misunderstood, but really, you would see, is good if only they could figure out how to _communicate_ all their complex thoughts

I think it's a useful distinction, there are lots of companies doing bad things that also happen to have "better comms".

People think ‘good at comms’ is to present stuff the public thinks is right. In reality, ‘good at comms’ to the comms team is to do whatever the CEO wants to talk about.

Not that I support this, but I believe this is how comms team sees it.

Compared to what?

I often wonder why that is. I think the old playbook for companies is just too slow and the consequences of the "new mask off" are not present in the current climate in the US. Everytime these CEOs make these announcements I always feel like they aren't talking to me, their costumers or the people but to the investors and their government. Something they have always said and done, just those conversions were behind closed doors and would be scandalous if heard. Now the playbook is to blog/tweet those fucked up views for more effect and faster reaction to get what you want.

Amodei is crawling back into Trump's ass.

It would've been surprising before LLMs. Now that you could run all of your communication through AI, or at least have it check it, it's outright negligent.

I think they are trying to please a split group of investors and public, of their major investors Google and Nvidia have signed the open source petition letter and Amazon hasn't, so their non position is trying to please every who has taken a clearer stance, although it's quite bad.

Amazon did sign it though...

Do you have a source for that? Everything I've read and can find still shows they haven't signed it.

www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/

Amazon is listed as signatory, I doubt microsoft just decided for them.

Thanks for that, I guess they might release a statement of sorts later? Quite a quiet signing on their part.

> I can't remember the last time (if ever) a company managed to go from golden goose to.. whatever this is..

It's WeWorse.

Anthropic has always been like this. People just responded to the message better when it came from the quirky underdog rather than the trillion dollar behemoth.

Trillion dollar behemoth, heheh.

> The permanent defensiveness in his presentation is really hard to swallow, it actively puts me off wanting to believe in or rely on their product line with Dario at the helm.

It does give me the faintest glimmer of hope about the people who live here, though.

People will start canceling their subscriptions. This is outrageous

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