On AI regulation and messaging
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> I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.
Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc. Rather we'll just do all of that even harder and the miracles ("curing cancer", lol) we've so far failed to deliver are bound to arrive in short order!
Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.
For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers meant no production happened.
Now, there's finally a chance at salvation. The capitalist Messiah is AGI and it will finally deliver them from those annoying laborers.
This ideological bent is why they're putting everything they have into AI. It's why VCs and their fellow capitalists are going so crazy.
They see it as a way to finally solve the contradictions of their ideology, but in reality it'd only create a new one: If everyone's out of a job, who will buy their products?
It doesn't matter that I can't do it. They'll pay me lots of money if they think I can.
AI will make human thought economically useless. In the new economy, the one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.
This is correct. But we don't need to ban AI to avoid the permanent underclass nightmare.
It's time for the means of production to be owned communally.
It's either a cybersocialist utopia or a neofeudalist dystopia.
Rosa Luxemburg formulated it pretty well more than a hundred years ago: Socialism or Barbarism!.
Today, people have leverage because removing them has real economic consequences. With AI, we need to be on the useful side of the divide to have any leverage.
And then we'd better hope AI has respect for property rights.
It's probably a lot easier to convince the military AIs we're building to do it.
I don't particularly like the situation, but I plan to do what I can to be on the winning side. The world is going to be what we're all in on building, and for people on the winning side it may be a utopia. Either way, I know which side of the gun I want to be standing behind.
Also note that an AI well aligned with the people who initially trained it wouldn't need to actually kill anyone that didn't take action against the owners, it would just need to outcompete people for resources, and let them fend for themselves in extreme poverty. There's no need to act one way or the other beyond that.
I'm talking about morality here, not practical ability. The ultrarich have their circle of friends and family, who themselves have their own social circle, on and on until suddenly you're not looking at wealthy people anymore. Six degrees of separation and all that. How many people in the social graph can know about this extermination plan before the whole thing collapses?
It's just disenfranchisement. Only the people who try to use violence to replace the political leverage they lose when they lose economic leverage would need any action taken against them, and that's easy to justify as self defense.
I think it's inevitable.
When AGI becomes reality, that reasoning disappears. When everyone's worthless, no one is. Thus the scenario you speculate about would need everyone in the upper echelons of society to be consciously, openly sadistic power-hungry people, which is not the case even when taking into account the higher dark triad rates among them.
Why did you think there's a massive uptick in surveillance and policing technology and automation? It's to make the French solution unfeasible.
What does this mean in practice? That an individual cannot own a machine (which is a means of production)?
As a first intuition, I feel like its mostly server farms and data centers that are the concern, large scale means of production.
It feels right that those would be communally owned, be that via democratic government or maybe some sort of worker owned coop?
Nothing prevents the government or coops today from building these things.
Permanent underclass is ideological goal of the above people. AI is an impersonal technology with no goals or wishes.
There's an inevitable effect that it has, and the only lever you have as an individual is being on the right side of that.
Even if the US federal government refuses to act, smaller government entities can deploy their own compute clusters running strong open-weights models like Kimi K3, and provide their own citizens with free access to strong AI models. There may come a time when even Chinese providers no longer release strong model weights, but then the previous generation of strong open-weights models can be used to accelerate the development of data pipelines and training setups to build the next generation. California or Australia (or many others) could fund university-led R&D efforts to build completely open models.
Despite the angry noises that leading providers make about their model outputs being used to train competing models, that's not illegal. States can use Common Crawl, Anna's Archive, Books3, commercial model outputs, and whatever other data sources that are useful for building models. States have sovereign immunity to ignore copyright complaints, if they decide to pursue model development.
The big AI companies don't have much of a moat. Let the big companies spend a fortune figuring out what works best, then openly build imitations having 95% of the capability at 5% of the cost.
AI is the least of the problem.
Can't help wondering if they've really thought this through.
That was the exact line of thought, coupled with resources are limited (marketed as climate change), that led to the 1 child policy in China and many other decisions that shall not be spoken of.
The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. (read on HN, not my words)
Just like the utilitarians in the thought experiment tossing everything positive in their life into the bottomless pit of suffering, the effective altruist AI thought leaders are tossing our entire economy to the gambit that the singularity will bring about the end of human suffering.
Can you find any explicitly EA organization that is at all aligned in perspective with anything you suggested?
Working to build AI at the company that is most publicly discussing the risks posed by AI to humanity and most advocating for guardrails (while getting an immense amount of flack for implementing them independently) doesn't seem to support anything about what you, or rather the other person said, about sacrificing humanity for anything AI related.
Anthropic are explicitly building ASI, using recursive self improvement, with no knowledge of how to control it. They spend only a minimal fraction of their funds on safety work, none of which relates to controlling ASI.
I am open to being wrong about Anthropic, but it will be hard to convince me that a company developing ASI is prioritising safety. Do you really believe what they are doing is safe?
It's kind of like saying you can't kill everyone with weapons when you're looking at what you can buy at the local Walmart and not what's in the 1000 foot deep missile silo.
Also, it's kind of a once you build it, it's too late kind of issue. No model will be good enough, the problem is still in the future, we're all dead.
Instead, he is turbocharging development, otherwise said choosing to cause harm he warns about.
That is literaly example of causing harm now and in near future, not caring about people now, only about vision.
He works on the safety team and their responsible scaling policies. He literally may be working on slowing down AGI progress at Anthropic.
Hiring own husband to safety team while you raise money for (their words!) doom machine, while you do your utmost to scare people while you try to raise even more money from investors on doom ... does not show OP was not correct in their assessment.
So Anthropic are going to spin up a medicinal chemistry lab and start mouse experiments?
I mean, it would be nice, but I don't think that the guys at Anthropic know what they're talking about here, or what they might be getting themselves into. (If indeed this is more than just PR.)
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the...
Didn't and don't mean to disparage anyone's medical struggles, but "a cure for cancer" is a well-worn strawman. One that's been achieved for the low hanging fruit, the higher ones are seeing steady progress (already before LLM chatbots, even!), the bottleneck isn't "intelligence" and to the extent there are socioeconomic (access to screening, treatment) or environmental/lifestyle factors involved the AI boom is likely just making things worse!
I'm sure Dario knows this, and it's anyway too pedestrian compared to the usual list of fruits of ASI. The text probably originally read "nanobots eating you alive and uploading to the cloud" or something, but they figured that wouldn't go over with the intended audience. "What do the peasants care about? Oh I know! Curing cancer!"
How else are you going to work towards a dream? It's how Elon Musk managed to get reusable rockets when everyone said it's unfeasible.
Granted, most ideas don't work, this is why you need testing, but I am a bit surprised to see this attitude on hacker news.
But they said that they want to cure cancer. That's far outside the core competencies of any LLM, and it requires a lot of real-world wetwork with liquids, chemicals, cell line experiments, animal experiments, etc. They can't merely analyze existing data -- they'd need to generate vast amounts of new data, which isn't really the case in physics. And then regulatory approvals and so forth.
"We're working on curing cancer" sounds more like a poor PR attempt than an actual effort, though I'd love to be wrong.
As if we didn't know the challenges in translating research into clinical treatments.
I wonder if many of the commenters here read the post, where Amodei specifically references his essay with suggestions for streamlining the FDA approval processes: https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential
Writing a paper on streamlining the FDA approval process is nice, and I agree with all of it, but it's one thing to do that (about 4 hours of work) and quite another thing to cure cancer.
My point was more that LLMs are exceptionally weak at developing drugs. They're strong at every math/logic/language task, but curing cancer is something of an entirely different nature. Again, if he wanted to "solve physics," or "develop a universal real-time language translator," or even "solve global warming," I wouldn't be nearly so skeptical.
...The first is something that can be credibly attempted with a next-gen super-LLM and a ton of compute. The second is something that LLMs are exceptionally good at, and a dedicated engineering effort might get you there. The third is a modeling/simulation problem with solutions that are, at least in principle, known but haven't yet been thoroughly weighted. (i.e., how bad really is ocean seeding or launching SO2 into the atmosphere?)
But curing cancer? It's not even clear how to approach the problem. Cancer is also heterogeneous... so when I say that LLMs are weak at developing drugs, the problem is compounded, as curing cancer might require dozens or hundreds of distinct new drugs. It's like Dario picked the least likely, most difficult problem to solve. So it's weird.
Did you know that Amodei was working on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford?
Given his background in biology, it is hardly like he is a random tech guy with no knowledge on the topic, as many here seem to imply.
Amodei mentioned "actually curing cancer" as an example of undeniable public benefit, not as an exclusive research focus or anything like that. He is clearly talking about generally intensifying biomedical efforts, not promising a cure for cancer specifically.
I think typical bubble behavior the leaders have set up the whole promise to fail. Everyone is expecting some faux super intelligence to come and find a cancer solution everyone else missed. However, it is just as likely that vanilla current LLM's will create enough of a productivity boost for back office automations in research heavy hospitals to create the space for regular humans to create these breakthroughs, but LLM's won't be able to claim that for themselves and inevitably “fail”.
They made huge progress, but I would say that the vast majority of work on this problem was designing the harness for the model. That's a lot of work for each and every domain.
Isn't that so far only static folding?
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-dis...
Turns out that “give a reasonable probability of being close enough such that you can bootstrap a solution out of experimental data” gives a very high utility and effectively obsoleted several experimental techniques overnight; pretty much “Molecular replacement” is about the only technique for phasing resolution anyone bothers with any more.
But again, “Bio” is an _extremely_ broad term; for every part of the field Alphafold had a big effect on there are a thousand different parts of the field that it did nothing for.
It's hard to keep track of the frontier on bio ML, but it seems that we're going slower than what Demis Hassabis said in 2024 with 5 years to full cell molecular simulation. We still aren't able to reliably model a tiny surface of the cell membrane.
And of course there's Derek Lowe's takes on the drug discovery pipeline waiting for the proof in the pudding.
To me the only reasonable bullish position is that there is a very non-linear AGI threshold for accelerating progress that we haven't hit yet.
For me personally, I'm looking at other more tractable fields as a proxy to measure this kind of progress. The best modest evidence is from the agentic coding area, (modest because these kinds of gains may not translate to bio progress). Other soft-ish fields to like legal/law/tax are also interesting to watch, as a small amount of people are now trusting AI for these areas that were considered totally unusable a year ago. Another proxy is being able to generate generally entertaining media.
P.S: I am not saying applications will go away but LLM's are clearly massively effective here at the rote parts of it all.
Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem, not a societal level coordination problem. And one AI has already proved to help with breakthroughs (alphafold). IMO it makes sense for them to shoot for something like that as proof of AI's beneficial sides.
I just don't buy the AI labs approach to this stuff. Like, unless we can basically simulate the entirety of human biology, I don't really see how LLMs can make progress here. Maths is different as it doesn't require a real-world interface, and programming already (by definition) can be simulated on a computer.
Without that, I can't see much (if any) progress being made on domains like biology.
Drug discovery is similar AFAIK. The space of possibilities is even larger than protein folding, but it's structurally similar enough that I think AI will help to make progress on the discovery side. Actually getting the drug tested and approved is another matter though for sure.
For one, the question for Anthropic is whether LLMs, specifically, not AI techniques more generally, can help significantly with cancer research. And here, all experience so far is that LLMs only really work when they can easily automatically verify their own outputs and self correct - such as in math (using automatic proof verifiers) or programming (using compilers and unit tests).
The second problem is that biological research speed is highly dependent on slow biological processes, such as cultures and long term studies. In programming, if an LLM could provide excellent insights and research suggestions 100x faster than a human, it would speed up the work roughly 100x. But in biology, it would only speed up the total work by a small amount - as any insight, even if absolutely brilliant and spot on, would still require months and years of actual experimentation.
If I was Dario, and I was after a cynical sales grab to go with the "actually curing cancer!" spiel, I'd probably aim for a drug repurposing strategy. I'd use the above approach to find existing drugs that might target known pathways that drive incurable cancers. I'd only screen compounds with extensive safety data and easy delivery mechanisms, and from the in silico hits, I'd throw a tonne of money at rapidly experimentally screening all those candidates in parallel, and then rapidly push those that worked into clinical trials. I'd assume that, with a small but non-negligible prior, and the money to push through hundreds and hundreds of candidate compounds through at once, I'd have a reasonable chance of getting one drug through to a "Claude Cured Cancer!" show-stopper headline.
But I think even then, with all of Anthropic's wealth, you'd need 2 years minimum to move from initial screening targets to a Phase 3 trial. And it would be an almost criminal waste of research funding to get there -- the dollars for discoveries ratio would be appallingly bad.
(If I was Dario, and I actually wanted to cure some forms of cancer? I'd just use my obscene profits to fund actual cancer research, step back, and let the researchers get on with it.)
I do agree that this kind of targeted approach makes sense.
However, discovery is not really the issue here. Running the clinical trials (1/2/3) is much much more difficult, and consumes basically all of the time in drug development, so even if LLMs perfectly automate this, the speedup will not be particularly large.
This is not correct, Alphafold predicts crystal structures of proteins. It is a known issue in the field that these folding models do not generate ensembles of protein conformations like the ensembles generated by DE Shaw Research (who built a super computer to simulate proteins). And these folding models fail when we don't have crystal structures, so they are certainly not generalizing. A great paper on the subject: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.03.636309v1
Drug discovery is significantly more complicated than protein folding. Small molecules with similar chemistries can adopt novel binding poses, can end up binding to off targets (PXR, hERG, etc) or simply never make it to the protein due to solubility or permeability.
I will always defer to Pat Walters who seems like the most careful and sane person in this field: https://patwalters.github.io/
This is not true. There are two companies at the center of AI direction: Anthropic and OpenAI. If there were anyone on the plant who has the ability to influence our direction then it would be Dario Amodei.
Acknowledging the grievances is a good step, but it's not enough. There needs to be a clear explanation of actions to address them, a plan to enact those actions, and commitments with consequences in failure of those actions. Tell people how you're going to make them more employable and effective and needed. Tell people how your datacenters will be carbon neutral. Tell people how financial actions resulting in a frothy market will be coming to an end. He and Sam Altman alone have this power and their inaction says everything we need to know about their intent.
Possibly, but not necessarily in a better direction. And that's the whole problem here. They should all go watch Phantasia.
Hoping that they solve those huge problems themselves is basically hoping that they will have more power.
It would be like expecting Craigslist to rescue journalism. The amount of power needed to disrupt an industry is nowhere near what's needed to fix it.
Anthropic is literally creating the bubble. It is not beyond their scope of influence, it is literally what they are consciously achieving.
As for peoples jobs, same actually applies. Anthropic is selling itself on dream of replacing jobs, even or especially where they are well aware AI does not perform that well. They are actively trying to replace people quickly before management notices it does not work well.
And also, they can influence how much their data centers contribute to global warming.
But something tells me either they can't or they won't, so no trust will be built.
If you don't tackle the societal level problems, nobody will care about research breakthroughs.
I don't think anyone will care about the largely made up issues about electricity prices or water use in case AI literally cures cancer.
His body was healthy, aside from the bullet in his skull.
Curing cancer is a societal problem. We have lots of cures for common diseases but resource allocation means people don't actually receive the treatment they need. For example, prohibitively expensive gene therapies, or HIV treatments in developing countries. A disease may have a "cure" but if people who need it don't receive it then from their perspective it may as well not exist.
This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid.
First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can.
Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks and academic papers as you like, but the reality on the hospital ward will always be different. Why do you think student doctors have to spend so many years "doing the rounds" Dario ? They are all academically smart, they are all capable of memorizing text books ... but there is no substitute for seeing and doing the reality.
I barely trust Claude to write code, let alone find a cure to cancer.
It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"
Don't worry, I'm sure that's his next blog post. Right after Claude has finished solving famine and poverty. ;)
How weird that all those humans seem not to trust the logic of their betters ;P
the ultimate utopia
We have more than enough food on the planet for everyone, and we have the ability to deliver bombs or soldiers or amazon packages to anywhere in the world in days or hours. Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone.
What people mean when they say “solve famine” is can we make people not starve without actually doing or changing anything - which is of course impossible.
We do this. Have you ever heard of UN World Food Programme? $14B funding in 2022 (since then dropped drastically, guess why).
Has it solved famine? No. Would it solve famine if it got the funding it needs? Unlikely.
Because you cannot just spend billions of dollars to send amazin food parcels across the world and expect that to fix climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education, and propably 100 other issues all contributing to the fact that we still have not end hunger. And no, AI won’t solve it either.
> Has it solved famine? No.
Hoist by your own petard
You know that saving millions of lives every year is better than NOT saving millions of lives, right? Just because something doesn't solve the problem 100% doesn't mean it's not VERY VERY good.
So one would expect $14b/year would solve about 14/93 = 15% of world hunger.
> The World Food Programme supports over 152 million people annually and delivers life-saving food assistance where needed most. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Food_Programme)
An estimated 757 million people are food insecure (https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...)
152/757 = the world food program helps ~20% of people who are food insecure. That's well in the ballpark of the estimated 15% spend.
If we spend that extra $93b, we'd be well within the range to actually stop world hunger.
Yes, "climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education" are still issues. No, you don't have to solve those problems to feed people. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Almost all recent famines have been caused (either deliberately or incidentally) by government policies, not lack of money. The UN spending 93 BB may (somewhat) improve the situation, but is unlikely to end food insecurity.
Eliminating corrupt leaders (i.e. Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, etc.), and poor regulation (e.g. Bombay Fodder and Grain Control Act, 1939) would be much more effective.
Actually, they were caused by lack of food.
> Eliminating corrupt leaders (i.e. Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, etc.)
Yes, which of the 757 million food insecure people is Putin responsible for their food insecurity?
North Korea has about 26mil residents, so if they were all starving that'd be 3.4% of the food insecure people. Gaza has about 2mil, so we can pin a further 0.03% on shitty governments.
Obviously it'd be great if putin, un and netanyahu were gone. They suck for a variety of reasons. But it doesn't change the fact that we could spend money and feed most of the people who are going hungry
This is a tautology; a lack of food can't be caused by a lack of food, as it is a lack of food.
>"Yes, which of the 757 million food insecure people is Putin responsible for their food insecurity?"
In Putin's case, he has caused the price of food to increase through his war on Ukraine, as the cost of fertilizer makes many agricultural products uneconomical to grow for customers in less-developed nations.
>"But it doesn't change the fact that we could spend money and feed most of the people who are going hungry"
There was food literally rotting away (elsewhere in India) during the 2013 drought in Maharashtra, but it wasn't possible/worth transporting it to the affected region (due to government interference).[1] In places like Bangladesh, recent governments have used famine as a tool for obtaining foreign aid while also exterminating or weakening opposition.[2] During the 1990s North Korean famine, plenty of food was offered to the regime, but it was mostly rejected, and that which was accepted was not widely distributed. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_drought_in_Maharashtra
[2] https://asianews.network/over-a-quarter-of-bangladeshis-suff...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine#Fail...
Mind you, UN’s Food -programme (together with education, progress of farming technologies etc) has been a huge success and hunger has dropped historically low. I couldn’t find data on how Trump’s cuts have affected the levels, but I doubt it has been a positive change by any regard.
Going back to the original allegory, just like cancer, hunger is a vastly complex problem with strong political ties (why have still have we not illegalised cigarettes for instance?) and no gee-wiz tech gadget, even as expensive as LLM model, will solve neither of them.
[1] https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/mississippi
I am arguing nothing except that it’s possible if we are willing to spend the money. No AGI is required to come up with a magic solution. It literally just requires spending a lot of money.
> Look at it this way, would Trump end hunger in Mississippi (about 600k people) if, say, Luxemburg would donate USA anout $400m required to end it[1]?
Probably not. But would trump step in and prevent luxemburg from stocking mississippi’s food banks? Could luxemburg send containers of non-perishable food to community centers in every city in the state?
It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultr... and (3) https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 for some background.
As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, higher tumor-suppressor-to-oncogene copy number, more robust tumor-suppressor networks, more self-anti-cancer apoptosis, CD47 suppression, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them.
"Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599206v1
"Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74300-9
"Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code" https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.ady4368
Is it a product available to humans at all?
A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor burden per unit time from whatever causes vs. the immune system's capacity to detect and destroy them per unit time. As humans age, the balance tips in one direction. If the balance is too far off for too long, tumors accumulate, doctors take notice, and assign whatever labels to the condition.
Looking into particular causes of tumors (and calling each cause its own cancer) can create a vast research program that employs a lot of people, since there are so many mutations that lead to tumors. But interrupting the development of a particular mutation is not going to have the same society-changing effect that solving the fundamental issue of rates would.
Literally first phrase on Cancer Wikipedia entry.... [1]
"Cancer is a group of diseases involving uncontrolled cell growth typically resulting in tumors with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body...."
I'm inclined to believe that the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually complicated. I would be surprised if the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually simple.
This is almost like an application of the conspiracy theory gambit where you try to find out how many people would have to be "in on it" in order to disprove the theory's likelihood. Like flat earth.
Also, not even all cancers have tumors. You have solid tumor oncologists and then oncologists who specialize in blood and lymphatic cancers, “liquid cancers”.
In addition, cancer does not arise from one mutation. It’s a set of mutations that allow cancer to occur. You need mutations for growth, mutations for preventing cellular death, mutations for stealing energy, mutations for hiding from the immune system. Your body, right now, has probably millions of cells that could be candidates for cancer. They either kill themselves or your immune system nukes them. You really need the stars to align on this stuff to get actual cancer.
And then, it’s not like the cancer stops mutating. Cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy through mutations. Cancer is “smart”, it will even temporary slow its own growth (metabolism) to intake less chemotherapy through treatment.
Here's another way of framing things that might encourage better discussion: Suppose in a few years, it was announced that an LLM did discover a cure for a cancer. What approach would you expect it to have taken?
1. Developing an intervention for every possible mutation that leads to loss of cellular identity, and uncontrolled growth.
2. Preserving immune function later into life.
3. Preserving genetic and epigenetic accuracy later into life.
Maybe it will be 1. But I would bet on 2 or 3. Which both assume that by reducing the difference between rates, the phenomenon of cancer could be reduced or eliminated.
Also: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/30/google-kills-alphafold-so...
Or, even better, they never even respond to surging memory costs by saying, "Don't worry, our brilliant AI will figure out how to produce cheaper memory." Because they know it won't.
I genuinely don't know how to interpret the bizarre clichés these people think in. Cure cancer. Make death optional! I can't tell if they're crazy, stupid, or liars.
All of those guys think people are stupid. That theme has been repeating over and over again.
Or do you believe that you are smart in every way there is to be smart?
Nixon was 24% when he resigned, which is amusingly not actually the lowest, as Truman seems to have twice achieved a spot rating of 22, though Nixon remains the lowest rating for a full year. I wonder what Truman did to be less liked than Nixon. Those were both well after dropping bombs on Japan and before the first H-bomb test.
> quite stupid
No. It's partisanship and polarization, which has little to do with intelligence.
But there's one thing that I know is stupid: assuming the reason opposite pole doesn't do what you think they should is because they're full of stupids.
Liberal or conservative, left or right, authoritarian or libertarian, it doesn't matter: if you (still) think Trump is the right man for the job, then you are either a criminal or other subversive agent, a glassy-eyed cultist, or stupid.
Failure to call out stupidity when we see it is no virtue, to paraphrase Goldwater. It is costing us everything we built as a society over the last 250 years.
No. I personally don't like Trump, and looking forward to the day he's gone, but:
1. Thinking of your opponents are stupid (or some kind of cartoon villain) is itself a really stupid attitude to take. It might feel righteous, but it blinds you. Some of them may actually be literally stupid, but there's no value in even thinking about them.
Looked at objectively, there's also lot of stupid on all sides. See: much of the Democrats'/progressives' reaction to Trump.
2. Approval is complicated. It's not a choice made in a vacuum. American politics nowadays is (for many people) a choice between the best of bad options. Partisanship exacerbates it, because it makes many of the alternatives seem even more loathsome.
3. Not everyone is a news junkie, and expressing approval of Trump (for instance), may not be even meant to be an evaluation of his job performance.
4. etc.
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist.
I think cancer will be solved by some group that could make a lot of money solving cancer. The probability of any one path working is very low so the payout would have to be very large for anyone to be willing to pursue.
I mean, yes, "I haven't looked into the specifics, but working from the first principles I came up with in 3 seconds, cancer research charities are in fact cancer on society" does come off a bit reductively cynical.
If you can find and patent a cure to cancer, you can charge whatever you want for it, at least in the US. I don’t think profit would be an issue.
And even if ending chemotherapy would discourage the incumbents, smaller companies would love the opportunity to kill them.
For example, Polaroid didn’t want to embrace digital cameras since they made tons of money selling physical film. But all the smaller camera companies didn’t care, since they weren’t benefiting from that and wanted to just take Polaroid’s market share. And that’s why digital cameras took off regardless.
If a big public charity is able to cure a cancer type (eg. lung cancer), then it's next aim would be to try cure another cancer type. Let's just say they are somehow able to cure all the cancers, and therefore they cured cancer, then there's distribution of the cure, with a focus on 1st world but then it would have to go to developing nations too. Along the way, there may be issues that arise in recovery from the cure, so money towards helping survivors there. Shift goal, shift goal, shift distribution/priority of donations, on and on and on. For the proper charities that do want to meet their goals, something like this is what they'd do.
In Canada, measles cases suddenly exploded in 2025 as well, and they don't have RFK Jr. there: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/
The policies around measles vaccines have shifted a little since RFK became HHS Secretary, but not in a material way. Generally the messaging has focused on putting measles, mumps, and rubella in individual vaccines rather than combined, but at no point has the federal government recommended not to get vaccinated. That, combined with the Canadian data, implies that RFK or other changes to US health policy are not likely to be the cause of the measles outbreaks.
There are charities that specialize in analyzing climate data to see where outbreaks may occur next. There are charities that just do government outreach to leaders that don't believe medicine is real.
If you want a simpler example that doesn't involve biotech research, I would just look at the diversity of animal welfare organizations, and their relative quality. Some of the best animal welfare organizations in terms of impact are local rescues run by (in my experience) spouses of wealthy career-people (executives, lawyers, etc.) who have a ton of free time and love animals. But then there are also plenty of animal welfare organizations with questionable motives, and questionable spending patterns - bordering on fraud and embezzlement, if not outright fraud and embezzlement.
It will become victim of the conflict between its core search for truth, the current administration mandate to spy on its own prompts for approval, and secret orders to hide the mission true purpose, like that other computer we have heard about.
What he is saying makes sense to me.
Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain?
Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure?
> Do you not think that Amodei, who worked on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford, knows a thing or two about how to apply AI to the problem?
It certainly shows he is ambitious.
> Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain?
Yes.
> Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure?
It is possible, but both could be true, that's not an exclusive or situation.
I am not familiar with Amodei's personal history, but I generally do not assume the worst of people just because they are extremely successful, like many others here seem to do.
Between Musk, Altman, Schmidt, Amodei, Gates and a bunch of others I have a really hard time figuring out who is the least ethical. Probably Musk. But it may well be that the long term damage done by Amodei and Altman is larger. Ask me again in 10 years, if I'm still around.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175827
The sbf vibes are on the nose. Remember that it was a big deal that sbf bought into Anthropic, and many if not most Anthropic employees are EA, the tribe of people I'd rather call "rationalizists". The main thing they rationalize, is of course themselves taking on power and what sbf made famous as uh the linear approach to risk
Between Altman and Amodei, I'd say that Amodei is the more dangerous just because he seems even more "reasonable" to nonjerks. You should ask the mods which one of the two they think are more reasonable. It's clear to lobbyists and politicians --- people familiar with the human jungle that is DC--- that Amodei is weirder, though.
I think I have a good metric for who is least ethical. Which one on your list is most unlikely to write good satire (or most likely to write unintentional self-satire?)
I'd say its Schmidt, followed by Amodei, and then Musk. See Musk on SNL. I think Gates had some TV appearances where he was reasonably funny, almost self-deprecating.
If you ask me, SBF ran an obvious scam in a sector that is as a whole a scam.
With Anthropic's product, I experience a real benefit today.
This reminds me of the myth of Prometheus. I think most Greek thinkers would agree that Prometheus was the hero, and Hephaestus a complete jerk, even though one was the master of fire and the other merely stole it. Of course they had to make up a punishment for Prometheus so that he could earn his status the meritocratic way..
Probably much against most people here, I separate the product from the person creating it. As another Anthropic example, there was the math guy at Anthropic who disproved a long running conjecture.. it doesn't look like he's getting Fable and Anthropic the respect he thinks they deserve. The process matters.
People are sensitive to disrespect hardcoded in the process, especially against "tried and true" norms, and in most cases they are right. The ability to write satire could be a kind of razor to tell apart the influencers who are likely to be righter than their detractors
The Fable quota on the $200 personal plan could be higher, but the difference to Opus 5 or 5.6 Sol is not large enough to gain any real benefit from unlimited access to Fable, for my use.
From what I heard their internal 'Model 2' is hardly much better, but hopefully they will have something newer soon.
I see the conflict of interest of course, but so far I have not seen anything that convinced me Amodei works towards any other goal than benefit for humanity as a whole, like he claims.
if many other see it as substantial ground, and you just say "I don't see anything", how do you think this discussion can go forward?
It's amazing that I even have to ask for it, as if I am just supposed to believe so.
Alternatively, one could also engage with my argument that Amodei's position seems consistent with his beliefs, and point out flaws with it.
As for "bad person" is concept you brought to discussion, it could mean many things, but you were provided with enough ground from opposite point of view.
> It's amazing that I even have to ask for it, as if I am just supposed to believe so.
toxicity only adds to your character of bias and denial.
You don't become a CEO of a company like Anthropic (or any sufficiently large company) without lying for financial gain
And they’ll be using detailed medical records. Personalized medicine and the use of ML in medicine has been around longer than LLMs (and will continue regardless). There is a lot more data available than just studies and textbooks.
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/pers...
"If you or a loved one have taken a class of drugs known as GLP-1, you may be entitled to compensation..."
A) verifiable proof generation (a limited closed set of axioms and a minimal algorithm like Metamath's are enough to verify correct vs incorrect machine intuition, plus feeding back the rejection/acceptance to adjust the machine intuition)
B) optimizing an illposed problem (how do we define the inaccessible fitness function)
Yes the field of biology or medicine will advance faster, but only because the mathematics and physics will advance faster, any non-axiomatic or non-postulate ramifications actually depend on unknown variables like fitness functions etc. How do you model the environment? That model will necessarily be oversimplified. What makes us believe that a long tail of ever less frequent distinct failure modes (like cancers, cancer is not a single problem) can not be guessed. It would require oracles and crystal balls: if global warming brings malaria mosquito's up north, then "eliminating sickle cell anemia" can actually turn into a death sentence instead of a life-long disease, but perhaps malaria will not come to higher latitudes, it depends on the future!
> This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid.
I mean, if Claude actually cures cancer, I do think he'll be right.
The only problem is that you need to actually cure cancer.
But instead of doing that, I'm going to drop everything and become a linux kernel maintainer. Learning about the internals of how RCU concurrency is implemented across subsystems is surely what I need to do right now!
(/j before I get crucified)
It signals to people who have money and/or influence that the speaker is "committed to doing the right thing" and "eager to find a workable path forward" that "meaningfully addresses the 'very real' concerns and misunderstandings that non-experts have about what the company the speaker is associated with are doing".
Once the speaker has signaled that, what more could they possibly do? They've signaled their willingness to open the channels of dialog with the rabble who are non-experts and -thus- cannot possibly be engaged with as equals. By doing this, the speaker tried their best, didn't they?
Or, to put it another way, it's PR and damage control... soothing theater for the folks who can actually affect them.
The way he's coming off here though gives me SBF vibes.
I know people in positions of power often see lots filtered information that skews their perceptions of reality, but it seems like the level of pure hype Dario's pushing exceeds even the typical sycophantic filter bubble. Cure cancer indeed.
Anything big enough always is, no? The next scale of order in the hierarchy starts concerned itself with what's good for it, at the expense of the smaller parts.
The fact that government is like a giant organization that everyone lives in, the fact that it mostly doesn't fuck us all over in terrible ways, that's a testament to the amazing alignment of regulation and law imho
The bio/cyber/alignment risk rhetoric is nonsense. Somewhat counterintuitively, all of those risks are lower/non-issues if frontier labs release their weights and do all of their research in the open, as explained in a past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313739
Again: if we were to regulate anything, it would be to force frontier companies to release their model weights and do all of their research in the open. This is a necessary yet insufficient condition for the intelligence explosion to benefit the vast majority of people.
No snark here from my side, just curious about your vision - which concrete actions by Anthropic could improve trust for the concerns you listed?
Considering the vast amount of money, world-class talent and political and industry vonnections Anthropic has access to, it feels a bit unfair to ask me to solve this for them.
My answer to their proposal for what our society should look like, and what kind of technologies we should use is "no". It's not a trust issue, as in I would not accept the proposal from anyone, even if I did otherwise trust them. And if someone I trusted insistently proposed this, I would stop trusting them.
In any case, they don't accept refusal, but try this grotesque and condescending maneuver about "trust", as if I and many others were not really just saying "no".
No one who refuses to take "no" for an answer can ever deserve trust. If you are committed to convincing me to go along with your desires, and have no intent of accepting my refusal, you will never deserve trust, and I will never trust you.
These companies may have the power to do what they want anyway. But they will never have a clear conscience, or trust and support from me or anyone like me.
Thiel et al. have described technological change as a means of forcing unilateral changes on an unwilling public. There is no basis for trust unless there exists a justice system that can appropriately discipline and restrain such people and their coconspirators, and force them to abandon their plans to inflict unwanted conditions on masses of people.
Surely it will be quite dystopian future - AI will dictate how the money allocated, where there is only one private company left - Anthropic (as per Dario says)
At the same time, the best Anthro models refuse to answer biology questions, keeping the public in the dark not only about new AI-assisted results but also about conventional and health-protective research.
D.A. >> we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months.
So, what changed? He went from a promise of AI bonanza any minute now to a promise to maybe cure cancer in the coming years, that's right, an unspecified number of years. Until that time, we're supposed to eat glimmers of hope because the AI-caused inflation will make food unaffordable.
D.A. >> When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.
And don't forget to stock on ear protection, because when something happens, it's going to be "as laud as possible", you've got Amo's word too - to marvel at in the meantime.
> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
Well, yeah Dario. You keep PUBLICLY TALKING about ways you want to fuck over people and everyone has noticed. I'm sorry, but when a lot of people are living paycheck-to-paycheck and watching layoffs everywhere, being like "well it'll take all the jobs and maybe kill humanity" is going to set off a LOT of alarm bells, despite your attempts to make concerned looking faces. You're trying to solve hypothetical problems in unproven ways, while worsening real problems people actually face. These people are SO disconnected from the society they live in.
People have a problem with the efforts, not that they haven’t reached utopia yet. Doubling the efforts will not solve the problem, it will only deepen it.
Other than the fact I doubt that will happen, if it did, I think it would just underline the trust issue.
If some independent group cures cancer using Anthropic’s models as critical support, that would be great—but the nature of biology and medicine is that guardrails to prevent misuse will also cripple research.
If someone with an tight special relationship cures cancer with special privileged access to Anthropic’s models cures cancer making significant use of the models, well, the cure for cancer is nice, but people are going to notice that Anthropic has the control over who gets to try, and the power to set terms, which underlines the stakes for the trust issue.
1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag about it as loudly as possible. Admirable dude! I actually trust him on this 100%
2. “We hope to have incredible results” -> doesn’t everybody hope to have incredible results?
3. “Some early glimmers in the coming months” -> is that planned for a few days before the IPO?
This guy says less than politicians do.
This is a good thing cause all politicians lie all the time :)
Most people start lying long before they reach any position of power and in many cases, lying is exaclyt how they got there. That's what makes it hard to fix: by the time someone is in power, the behavior has already been rewarded and is already doing a snowball effect. I'm not defending it (especially in Politics, it shouldn't be legal), just acknowledging reality that people lie about tiny things, so of course they lie about big things. It's more of a people problem, not only a people-in-power problem.
In practice, I doubt that they have a way out of all the lie-parade as well while being able to maintain their position, imagine if today any politician/CEO suddenly acknowledge "oh sorry guys, all that time we were just lying" => Career death (with snowball effect)
They call it The Republic.
The future is being held back by profit motives.
tl;dr - there is no conspiracy. It's just just hard.
PS: correction - not generics, but variants of Ozempic. But the point still stands.
Yes, I know someone patented a "cure" for hemophilia which repairs the DNA of said patient. But that's just because no other pharmaceutical thought it worth their while to fight the patent since the number of patients is small.
But I can guarantee you that a cancer cure patent that repairs the DNA will be fought in Court.
You can't patent "repairing a road" but you can absolutely patent a new mechanism to do so.
Most patents are of this form - there are far more patents for improved ways of doing things than initial ways of doing things.
If several genes are faulty and I repair them what would be the innovation? The detection of a specific set of faulty genes? The order of repair?
Big Pharma has long figured this out and I have inside knowledge from people who know that this is the reason they're not pursuing it.
P.S.: Big Pharma is now quietly also researching gene repair but I believe it's to hedge their bets. Maybe they're counting on "lobbying"/bribing politicians to allow them to patent gene repair regardless.
Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors.
Hence the "We're curing cancer, no, really" pitch - because within 6-12 months everyone else is going to be doing code and text cheaper and better.
What’s the source for this claim? Is this true in real dollars or just nominal? What about as a percentage of total GDP?
and people say advertising doesn't work
He hasn't learned the correct speak yet. He should instead say that he is _very confident_ that they will cure cancer until the end of the year.
Really, guys, learn from Musk, he is the master of promising everything, but not actually committing to anything.
I would imagine "hope" in this context is more expectation for him than the average person who might "hope" for something incredible but rarely do they base their entire career on it. Or maybe I'm just not too acquainted with silicon valley types. I always thought the whole delusional optimism was just a show for investors.
Which is apt. His LLMs are slated to replace the work force, and he will replace the politicians.
Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary Person. All the safety rhetoric, never supporting open weight models, the lockdowns on harnesses outside claude code, etc.
Anthropic if you care about public good, do something to empower people. Release an OSS model. Open source Claude Code. Open source some inference tooling or something. Just give people anything except your words.
The AI industry and all of its sycophants in the Trump administration are working very hard to make you believe this.
Is this what kids call rage bait these days?
If an ASI model is 100% aligned to user intent then you only need one person on earth to prompt "kill everyone" for an extinction-level invent.
There's no logical way around this. The model either has to ignore the person at the helm or we have to do a multi-national abort before RSI. Anthropic is trying #1.
― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
"Please run N tasks doing X for Y duration, I want to test something"
"Hmm but that would waste tokens, we shouldn't do this test"
What the hell type of product is that? I wasn't asking, I was ordering it to do something, if Anthropic can't get their model to do as I say then I'll just go use someone else's.
I feel that everyone in this small AI bubble (compared to the "normies") is busy trying to take advantage of AI to surpass everyone else, while fearing being surpassed by everyone else.
Most people assume LLMs are just a tool for making money, an arms race over wealth and social rank. But those like Dario seem to be worried that LLMs could potentially be used as automatic rifles by some dedicated psychopaths. Whether it could be that dangerous, or just an exaggeration, or we should have everyone armed, require licenses to own one, or outright ban them, is debatable. But I can understand his point.
All I can say at the moment is that this is more subtle than the superficial conspiracy/black-and-white narrative.
Because the reasons outlined in the article, plus many others. Concentration of power, unemployment, rising energy/living costs, stealing of digital artifacts owned by people.
I myself acknowledge that AI is useful. But due to the reasons above, I will be anti AI for the most part.
Yes, it doesn't matter if AI manages to cure cancer. Due to the reasons above, I will be anti AI. I suspect a lot of other people feel the same way.
And we’ve seen unprofitability not being an issue for a lot of companies. Markets function in funny days nowadays.
This line of reasoning is really very silly. I can be looking out for my young child by choosing not to put them behind the driving wheel of my car.
There are both stupid and malicious people in the world. If you have a tool that you believe may be genuinely dangerous in the hands of the wrong person, it is not the smart thing to do to give the public unrestricted access to that tool. Do you think it would be sensible to give every individual on Earth a nuclear weapon to do whatever they want with?
This is actually a good point. Open models are getting better and better, some of them might even be useful in consumer hardware now. But if AI performance is still correlated with compute power, then no doubt power will remain with the people owning the chips.
Are you self-hosting Google or Bing? No, but we have quite a huge ecosystem of full-text search tools with PageRank, with options to scale to almost Google scale (if you have the money). After all LLM training starts with the same crawl mechanism.
As long as barriers to entry is not too high (ie. it makes sense to take the risk to start a business that provides something similar - usually for a niche) market forces work.
We have the classic empirical chart reproducing microeconomics.
https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res...
And setting up a pharma plant is also very capital intensive.
Here the obvious barrier to entry is completely artificial. (Which provides an incentive to spend a lot of money on R&D -- though it naturally raises the question of Pareto efficiency.)
1) in things like tax law, registering with city hall, dealings with the DMV, your phone subscription, insurance contract, ... you will find that one of the new fine prints in the contract will be that you're not allowed to use AI to communicate with them.
2) because of how SynthID works (you need the SynthID keys to verify, which are secret. So the only way to find if text is ChatGPT/Google/Anthropic watermarked is to ask ChatGPT/Google/Anthropic), government and large companies can enforce this against you. That is what the watermark is for. To end any insurance claim written by AI with "you're not allowed to submit AI written insurance claims" and refuse it outright there and then.
"Sorry your request was AI watermarked and pursuant to law 234 of 2025/03/11 chapter 3258 paragraph 33 decile 1299 we hereby close it without response"
3) when they reply, however, they use a custom model that also has custom SynthID keys. You will not even be able to tell their responses are AI written, or at least, you won't be able to prove it. You won't be able to enforce any AI-related rights (ie. the right to talk to a human) you have under the law against large companies.
In other words: this is to make sure that all the advantages AI provides are available to deny your unemployment claim, and to Verizon to charge you more, but completely inaccessible TO YOU when you want to change to a cheaper subscription. They can inundate YOU with AI-written requests BUT YOU CAN'T.
Self-hosting helps because it prevents them from verifying if your responses are AI written, because you can generate non-watermarked AI text and so there is a level playing field.
2) What actual law/regulation would that currently be that would be used for such an outright refusal?
3) Would that comply with current regulation?
For government, because it's in law or regulations (ministerial decisions in Europe). For large companies "You agreed to it" (you know, like you agreed to allow Verizon to sell your location data to Palantir)
The other 2 questions I don't understand. My point is that the EU AI directive makes this possible. Makes it possible in ONE direction, while prohibiting the other. AI can be used by government and large companies to spam you and deal with you, and can't be used by you without being 100% up front about that to them (ie. enabling refusal)
Just agreeing to it isn't necessarily enough at least in some countries.
2) What laws and sections specifically makes that possible? Are there examples of that happening?
3) Where can I find that interpretation of article 50(?)? Some other article? (To the extent that things would need to be labelled/watermarked etc.)
No. Here is the list of organizations that have the power to make laws in the EU (and JUST the across-the-EU part of that list, within countries, within states, within provinces, within towns there's another list). This is referred to in legal tradition as the "Hierarchy of norms", because there is also a clear order defined.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/eu-hiera...
It'll be spec'd out so that it's cheaper to bend over and take it than take it to court and prove them wrong.
Toll road contractors, military base housing, municipal utility providers, private prisons, auto towing/impound, private rail transit operators, utilities, etc.
Basically every company the government grants a captive market to abuses everyone in that captive market as much as they can get away with.
however, AI doesn't really influence this. already there's a lot of problem with things like Ticketmaster, Apple's walled garden, abuses of IP law (patent trolls, DMCA trolls), etc.
the insurance industry is a prime example of this. the suffering caused by power imbalance is incomprehensible, and yet there's not enough political will to address this.
sure, it's easily possible that some important aspects of our everyday lives will be worsened by bad AI regulation. but IMHO this is wholly an upstream problem, it's a symptom of bad politics. (a byproduct of the Zip2 to Tesla to "democracy with roman salute characteristics" pipeline.)
that said, obviously the foundation to have any chance of a nonpatological market to exist is that self-hosting has to be legal.
The #1 post on HN right now[1] is full of people jubilating about how they can run Qwen 3.8 27B on their > 5 year old GPUs. If that isn't democratization of AI, I don't know what is.
I'm sure he's smart enough to instantaneously realize this too, but as the famous Upton Sinclair quote goes, he won't mention it even if he does.
I think access to compute will matter just as much, if not more, as access to models.
I'm not sure whether that's low or high, or how it compares to a general audience.
> Even if we assume that models will no longer improve and we reach a point where everyone can run Fable in their laptop, surely running 1000x Fable agents would give you an advantage.
IMO, asymptotic advantages are marginal. At least for coding, we got a glimpse into how much of an advantage it gives (or doesn't) when the Claude Code codebase leaked[1] ~4 months ago. :)
If you want to leave it running with the fans going crazy for 40 mins or overnight or something, fair enough, but otherwise it doesn't seem worth it to me. It's certainly not "interactive", even taking into account the over-thinking it does by default.
The 3.6 (maybe they'll release a 3.8?) MoE model is much more usable (but obviously not as good) on this machine spec.
Making "tech" a career and a societal goal onto itself, without the adjoining understanding of and deep commitment to ethics and the responsible use of power, is why we're sliding into authoritarian rule by a small circle of techno-oligarchs.
We need less "move fast and break things" and more "plant trees you will not live to see bear fruit."
The point "AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power" is not that correct. They need this statement to be true, otherwise no way to justify the trillion evaluations.
How is it not true?
The biggest companies in the world are, quite obviously (just look at the numbers) going to be AI companies. The most powerful governments in the world are quite clearly going to be those that are close to (or in control of) AI companies. People have a very hard time seeing the second order effects of the control of intelligence - we need to fix that.
The outputs of models in AI datacenters are the work.
The electricity company does not get the entirety of my useful input to the work as a result of me using electricity, but an AI company does.
Iran has hit the Amazon data center in Bahrain. The Ukranian deep drone bombing campaign has hit refineries, but also Wildberries, the "Russian Amazon" warehouses. The US campaign against Iran now, Iraq and Serbia previously, targeted power infrastructure. It will obviously be a target in the next war, and AI goes on that list too.
Every time the US completes an AI data center, someone in the Chinese nuclear command updates their target priority list. And vice versa.
You might have stumbled on the way to convince people that more data centers are a good thing
Electricity needs transformation to be useful. AI is the transformation layer, a sufficiently advanced AI system could secure an advantage in practically any economically relevant domain. If you have the best AI in world where embodied robotics are sufficiently advanced, you also have the best doctors, lawyers, engineers, logistics network, PR, weaponry, tactical leverage, etc.
Anthropic clearly are not though, and to call their operations wasteful is an understatement.
The AI labs don't matter. It's the hardware that matters. Everyone should have access to local AI capable hardware, not just these trillion dollar corporations. We just need to ensure consumers continue to get powerful hardware somehow.
I propose taxing the hell out of these hyperscalers and giving subsidies to individuals and small business to foment local and decentralized AI capabilities. Also ban these "we bought the entire chip production all the way through 2030" deals.
Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.
Layoff.
What do you mean?
It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-...
FWIW I think this is an artifact of site design more than anything else. A commentary site like HN in 2026 encourages hot takes and karma farming. All the "social media" with higher quality commentary like Substack and LessWrong center a large text blob of thought at the top and encourage reading more than writing. This puts up just enough of a barrier to write a hot take that you need to read the whole article and puts enough UI friction from leaving a throwaway angry comment that those folks will scroll away.
HN on the other hand all but encourages shallow posting. The article isn't posted, commentary is more prominent than the article itself. Leaving a comment takes 2-3 clicks and the comment editing flow excludes every other comment on the site, encouraging a write-first mentality. Ranking commentary based on upvotes offers a sweet dopamine hit over collecting karma. In 2026 these all encourage low quality engagement.
HN's UI has stayed relatively the same over the years while the Internet around it hasn't and I think its UI now acts as a low quality commentary attractor. LW changed its site design to stem the tide of low quality comments that show up here. LW comments certainly have their problems, but then, we humans all have problems :) On balance the community is much sharper and much more capable of having intellectually heavyweight, sober discussions on controversial topics. Of course nothing seems to trump my own friend network.
and i honestly would rather have a reddit lite site like hacker news where there appears to be at least a diversity of opinion than the pseudo-intellectualization cjing occurring among the exact same sort of AI cockgobblers on LW
Why? Isn't that available on literally every single other tech comment section on the Internet? Like what distinguishes these angry comments from the ones on Techcrunch or Ars or Reddit subs that tolerate AI? If I wanted mindless diversity I'd just have the LLM generate random perspectives.
My explanation is - the technology is amazing and engineers admired it, but CEOs kept talking about an exponential curve while engineers on the ground started to notice signs of Gartner hype cycle curve.
We saw this play out with the social media era. Incredible technology but it’s now ossified into deteriorating closed platforms mostly filled with algorithmic, ragebait slop surrounded by ads. Fool me once.
Open Source, hacker culture, scorn of "the suits", the love of sci-fi and it's attendant politics -- the bulk of actual technical people have a long history of being very politically aware and deliberately eschewing money for their values. It was rarely Marxist Class-Conciousness type stuff, but it certainly was aware of the political environment we were in.
I agree about the ethos and ethics of early hackers. But, I note that -by volume- most of the folks who do programming and nearly all of the people who are software-industry managers [0] are not hackers.
[0] I'm including managers at all levels, including the executive levels.
Though, given that this was originally a message board and hangout for folks deeply involved with YCombinator, and that prior to LLM Mania, the most commonly posted stuff was either "Techie 'lifestyle' blogging" or "Vapid thinkpieces", it's not surprising.
Mine is based on two things:
1. The fact that i grew up in poverty and never want anyone else to suffer that fate.
2. I was raised in a religious tradition that can be accurately described as socialist.
1) Those with cautious, but enthusiastic, optimism for the technology and an understanding that things never work ideally in tech and any advancement that moves the needle even slightly is worth embracing.
2) Those who are so dogmatically opposed to AI that they leave logical conversation at the door in favor of just repeating whatever negative gotcha they heard last when the topic of AI comes up.
I'll say that the ratio of these engineers seems to be about 10:1 in real life versus 1:10 online, at least in my experience, roughly speaking. I don't think I've actually ever interacted with actual "AI/Tech Bros" who are obnoxiously pro-AI the same way that many of the people who are "anti-AI" come off.
The data I'm working with is biased (I've been working in high tech for a while now), but I'm left to conclude that the people who love to hate on AI online are those who love to hate online while most other people aren't particularly interested in defending a technology online that they feel is inevitable and doesn't really need defending.
You sometimes see people on reddit amazed that "reddit's opinion seems to have changed". Nothing changed, just a different subgroup. You'll see the other opinion again if you wait for another similar article.
For example, the "did bother reading the article" crowd is attracted to certain headlines, and this probably isn't one of those.
I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.
A product still requires a lot of handholding and human thinking, at least if one does not want everyone even throwing a glance at it to immediately be repulsed by the usual AI slop tells.
> I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.
It absolutely already is a historical game changer on par with the Industrial Revolution when it comes to the amount of jobs destroyed and economies screwed up - and the impact will be even worse in 10+ years as existing seniors retire but no new seniors rise as AI has destroyed entry level career paths.
Which economies are already screwed up?
IMO it can’t ever be on par with the Industrial Revolution because AI can only really affect the information economy. Things people do with their hands/bodies have either already been automated or can’t be with current tech. If you’d asked people decades ago they might say no one will ever work in factories by 2026 because they’ll all be automated. It didn’t work out that way. I think AI will go the same way: absolutely game changing to some industries (of which software engineering will be one) but a great many will still survive with less dramatic changes.
If anything it might result in more focus on the human aspects. How many people out there earn their stripes putting together slide decks? In a world where an AI can put together the snazziest presentation you’ve ever seen in a heartbeat it’s going to matter more how you stand at the front of the room and present those slides than it does today.
The way it changes the game is by lowering the cost of making radical bets so we end up trying more moonshots.
Or an example of MS - their main cost like most software companies are people, especially software devs, which are to be replaced by AI so on the surface they would greatly benefit from it. But their products are centered around helping out people do stuff on the computer. Why would you need that when the AI will do it better and faster directly operating on the data or using e.g. Python?
Second, the Internet didn't show up much in GDP and similar measures either!
But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachable on a smartphone) that we should be seeing something.
But I am just as amazed with how little real life consequence it seems to have! Even software houses were hit more by interest rates than by this magical revolution.
If I couldn't directly observe Fable in action, I wouldn't believe in AI.
>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 4.8 can do. I push its code straight to prod.
>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 4.6 can do. I push its code straight to prod.
>>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what GPT5 can do. I push its code straight to prod.
>>>>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 3.5 can do. I push its code straight to prod.
What would produce huge "gains" (depends on who you ask) again is the automation of the myriad non-digital roles/companies, but good luck with that...
I'm definitely seeing indie-sized games that appear to have had significant input from AI, though I'm not sure the balance between AI for coding and AI for assets. My experience attempting this directly suggests that the current level they work at can make very simple games as one-shots, but anything more than trivial will produce outputs only as good as the developer's combined willingness to put in effort tweaking things and taking it all one step at a time, and their taste about what "good" even is.
I'm using spare credits to build and improve an isochrone map renderer, which I otherwise wouldn't have had time for (apart from anything else, I'd have had to become skilled in JS+wasm, somewhat of a pivot from iOS). This also requires taking it all one step at a time, having UX and UI taste.
Having lived through GeoCities since before it was bought by Yahoo!, taste is… well. Most people make things that nobody else actually wants.
I've done amounts of refactoring and fixes and written tooling that just wouldn't have happened before.
I'm not sure what amazing new stuff y'all expect but the amount of technical debt in my projects is actually going down, cause I can finally get good enough test coverage, including E2E/load tests that actually prove whether the software works and scales or doesn't - just last week I diagnosed issues with SeaweedFS failing under concurrent writes when backing Sentry and could swap it out for Garage in a day, caught by a monitoring tool I slopped together that integrates with the Sentry API, no issues since.
The environment around me has gone from drowning in tech/ops debt to sort of swimming and at least holding above water for now (cause nobody will pay for 5x more tokens).
It's also insanely good for prototyping and being able to actually explore various ideas and shoot the bad ones down quickly instead of handwaving and looking at a loaded calendar, alongside being able to address well bounded tasks in parallel, better than human developers can - like I can give 5 GitHub issues to the slop machine and have it fix all of the annoying bugs. Issue with how some data shows up? Just feed it the DB dump and let it find out what's up.
Some projects have gone from around 500 code tests to around 4000, and before anyone says they're meaningless, at least 5% of those have caught real issues and helped a bunch, alongside linters and other tooling (including some tools I wrote myself). I've also written both native utilities and some web platforms for myself, side projects that I never would have gotten around to.
I'm measurably more productive than I've ever been (since I did measure that, looking at my commits over the last 2 years) but also burnt out. Still, it's the kind of burnout that's the consequence of context switching and lots of work, rather than the kind that I had years ago, where I had to manually untangle deeply nested Spring Boot service logic all over the place at like 2 AM cause the made up deadlines were kicking my butt.
In contrast to others, I don't need to move the goalposts - the productivity for me is here and now. Any future models will just make it better, unless we experience model collapse.
Disclaimer: you do need a LOT of code tests and validations, otherwise it all goes to shit. Maybe I'm just extending how much time it will be until it goes to shit for me as well, but go figure. You also have to babysit the models more than anyone would like or should, most of my work usually has 20-60 minutes of planning before dispatching the agent.
Implement features at a viable pace and drown any unrealistic expectations in reports of CVE fixes - usually a version bump of dependencies, but quite often also some migration work within the app; write tools to make that work visible like I did with scanning and reports, and enjoy living without having to complain about how you can’t keep up with releases while letting your software rot until it’s a multi-year migration.
Alongside that, do the same for test coverage as well because it’s the humans that have been sloppy for years and didn’t work enough on the test harnesses or good enough coverage, introduce Testcontainers and load testing tools and anything else that makes sense.
Use their money for tokens to build software that is actually good and make your life easier and ensure that their shortsightedness won’t sink the product on a few years.
Of course you could also get fired if they’re stupid, but then I don’t imagine that working for those that are delusional is exactly great either, unless the goal is explicitly to make slop to get investor money in which case the whole thing will probably need to be rewritten from scratch anyways so who cares.
The earliest used models in this category would easily 10x (what did I just say) the creation of one-off short scripts, but you're not writing a 30-year app out of just a bunch of short scripts.
The METR time horizons graph suggests we can now get 10x (ahem) speedup on solving most coding problems that take us a few hours and about half of problems that take 2 days. Amdahl's law bites: even infinity speedup on half your problems is only 2x overall.
If you let an LLM loose, with a huge budget, what's the biggest artefact it can make before it drowns under the weight of bad decisions? The C compiler and web browser headlines a while back? The maths papers we see now that solve problems which stumped the maths world for decades?
But this is the other side of the same coin: teamwork. One person getting a thing made in twelve months vs a team of a hundred, you can scale up fast with money when you have a proof of concept, and an LLM can make a lot of proofs of a lot of concepts even in free accounts.
I do agree that the port would've taken a lot longer without LLMs though.
The actual hard part is getting it into idiomatic, safe rust, and I don't believe the LLM port makes the full transition any easier than doing things the old fashioned way: a dual lang code base like Linux.
Doesn't matter.
The vibe coded rust port did not get them any closer to full compiler verified memory safety. They still need to go file by file, bit by bit, and make it memory safe, at which point, why not just do that from zig.
because for the same effort you get a better result if you can and do use a better tool?
But I don't think they did it in a way that actually provided a meaningful gain. My point is that the state of the codebase right after the code is just a worse version of the original zig code with few of the rust advantages. Going from that Frankenstein rust code to actual memory safe rust is a similar leap to going from zig.
...
how so?
let's say Linus opens a branch, rust-temp, and in 2 weeks pushes ~15 million lines of code deleting most of the old C code. and then it gets merged in a few weeks. and then there's still a few months of the "merge window" and RC process. and each day folks report bugs, and automatic fuzzers make sure that both versions "behave the same".
I was pretty skeptical (still am), but what the Bun team did is pretty great so far.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust details the process, we see the results (Node.js compat [0], more than 3 thousand of issues fixed since since 1.3 [1], more than 900 issues fixed in ~24 hours [2], and it's live/in-prod [3])
> 50 dynamic workflows in Claude Code run continuously over the course of 11 days.
so let's say 500 workflows could do something similar for the kernel. the reported cost is 165K USD, so let's say this would cost 1.65M USD, plus CI costs [4] (which is ~200K/year for bun, so let's say it's 2M USD for the kernel)
How much the world is spending on kernel bug bounties and various security programs each year? (rough estimate says that just the visible kernel testing programs cost at least 15-30M / year)
The bar is not perfect. The bar is something better.
[0] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2087436767054213517...
[1] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2082298681223680002...
[2] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2080882189663907859...
Long term stability is the thing that matters, such a move would be immensely threatening to long term stability.
the point is that it's a quite obvious opportunity that was just some pipedream years ago.
by the time v8.0 comes around we'll have more data on the bun rewrite. also we'll see how LLMs will affect the productivity of kernel developers, and the overall stability/maintainability.
You're not wrong. We're already seeing something similar with all the outages and buggy software updates these days.
We little choice in the matter, you will have ze (software) bugs!
I'm actually basing my opinion off the blog post, specifically the code. While they do get a few changes for free with the port, most of the code looks identical. And the number of unsafe statements certainly agrees.
And now they're going little by little, playing whack a mole with seg faults... My point is that the step they're at right here is the important part, and that mechanically converting the entire codebase to rust was an optional step when incrementally rewriting would've worked just as well if not better.
Being "only" 165k USD doesn't mean anything, because you didn't do a complete port, you did a port in a trench coat. If they went for the more targeted module by module approach, and did a clean and proper rewrite, LLM assisted or not, they would reach their end goal much less turbulently and without the effort of that initial frankenport.
for me it was already "don't run in prod" quality before. (at least after this I'm considering adding it to the CI to see how it fares.)
segfaults. I don't know. I looked at their CI and GH issues over the past few weeks. (though now GH is down so I can't do a search, but I didn't see thousands of segfaults.)
by all accounts and measures it seems it made their house of cards more manageable. despite the frankenport, no?
they already had a zig compiler fork, wanted to upstream it, but the zig maintainer(s) said it's low-effort. now they don't have to maintain their compiler fork. (or wait for the zig team to deliver the features they wish for.) no need to maintain a hybrid codebase. (though it has C++ because of the embedded JSC.)
also I have no idea what's the zig-rust FFI status, but getting over with a rewrite faster is usually better, even if you are left with non-idiomatic code.
After an aquisition earlier this year I got the task of doing an SAP-Integration for the new company, last time I did this 5 years ago it was a 6 month task, but with the experience and skills ive gained since I estimated it would be a 3 month project (with or without AI, most work is just logistics, AI cant help much there).
In those 3 months I was able to not only integrate SAP but also deliver a completely modernised user-facing software for that integration. While I could have written that software myself in a vacuum it would have never been worth it financially, since it would have delayed the launch of the integration by 6+ months. Building the software post-launch of the integration would have easily taken 2.5 years at minimum.
But this is also basically a "spherical cow in a vacuum" scenario, where I was essentially acting as a solo dev, in full operational control of the project, with deep domain knowledge of the topic and an allready fully set up codebase that I knew perfectly while working down ideas I've had in my backlog for 5+ years.
What you have said is correct, it lets you build software much faster. The question however is: is that software making money for the company? (Not talking about what you built but in general)
I think, with AI, companies are saying yes to a lot of things they would have said No to ik say 2020. And as a result realizing “just building it” is not the answer.
Previously your GTM team or Product team would say “If we ship some big project X, we unlock $Y in revenue” but now people are realizing that those projections were really more of a hope. So companies are spending so much more tokens and shipping so many more PRs based on hope but a lot of it just doesn’t turn into meaningful revenue, especially not in short term
This sort of system only works with internal software and an unusual amount of data. If we were in the business of selling that software we could not have charged a higher price for the new version over the old, the tweak could only be unlocked because we were able to control staff hiring and staff onboarding fully to make use of the new changes.
As part of the aquisition I got access to their previous codebase which was some sort of incomprehensible PHP monolith, with the persons who wrote that code long gone. Thanks to LLMs I was actually able to extract the core useful concepts (again, sufficiently deep domain knowledge that I knew exactly what to look for). Without LLMs i would have probably extracted the absolute minimum and let the rest rot.
There is no reason a dev of comparable skill and domain knowledge would not be able to do that for what I built here.
By that point it might no longer matter though, but I suspect that such code would have a lot more exposed edge cases than one where someone actually thought things through before coding.
So yes, many aspects of my job are now 10x as productive, but turns out that improves my overall throughput only very little.
The last 30 years of tech has been about big, the dot com boom, the next unicorn, the magnificent 7 or 11 or whatever.
The thing is that the missing solutions people want have never been the one sized fits all multi Tennant we need 6 rounds of seed funding kinds of problems.
The "app boom" should have been a clue that smaller, niche services are viable.
IF tech were like construction, then most of HN, most of SF Bay Area, most of "tech" seems to be concerned with building the tallest building, or a massive housing development. Your average office worker is more akin to a home owner, who has a busted outlet, a sticky door, a dripping faucet, they just work around it because the resources to fix it (programers) are going to build the next big thing.
Those workers now have tools to address those problems, themselves.
I have lawyers and writers (far removed from tech) talking to me about cron jobs and scripts they are running that solve real problems for them. AI has allowed them to accomplish this.
These things arent showing up on GitHub. They dont make quarterly reports at a publicly traded company. The mountain(s) of change are happening by stacking grains of sand, not one solid rock.
Hey, I just found 3 niche businesses that I can run because of AI and clear a million a year after costs.
Fight club rules apply, you dont talk about your advantages.
You get lawyers talking about their AI use (sometimes) because they are protected by the requirements of the bar. You people in niche businesses, or where it's about personal productivity, talking about it cause you cant replicate what they have done. You get folks in the sciences talking about how they are using LLM's to generate the python & scripts that make their world function with easy (rather than be a bottomless pit of time). These are people who might talk about their AI gains, but often have better things to do and don't run in programing / tech circles.
Unless you seek these people out you're not going to find their gains. It would be pretty hard for someone like anthropic to even begin to quantify time savings from generated code by "non programers" - because they don't have the data.
Maximalists: 10x
Minimalists: were always close to 0x individuals, so opinion rejected 99% of the time
Realists: 30-50% productivity gains
80% of the engineers out there are the 0.5-1x baselines that we have to optimize the 10-20% around to carry...
Secondly, if you look at what Dario has actually written, then the cure to the big conditions like cancer is in his view hopefully going to be a result of scientists working 10x faster and therefore making big Nobel prize paradigm shifting discoveries 10x faster. So Anthropic suggesting “we are going to cure cancer” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. According to his original vision it looks like a bunch of groups now using AI independently producing breakthroughs which cure cancer.
Law abiding US citizens won't be able to run them, but you didn't solve anything other than making sure US citizens pay Sam or Dario.
I rather let citizens of my country exercise our own authority and agency when deciding what is necessary for good societal outcomes (LLMs aren't necessary).
But yeah if you only rely on money and not people power campaigns are expensive and hard, when you have entire communities backing you things become slightly easier.
Consider this though: Regulating AI models in the US benefits the data centers, not individuals. That's where regulated models run. Regulated models creates demand for data centers.
Dario wants regulation so he can continue to sell access to his data centers.
> Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution
Which is exactly why Anthropic contributes nothing to, and actively pushes for roadblocks and regulations for open weight models. Can't allow any hope to the masses.
Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable. Which of course we have have aggressive guardrails for in case you even try to use it for something dangerous like AI model developement. Plus we are going to retain all data submitted to it just in case someone is trying to be sneaky.
It's very dangerous to Anthropic's bottomline!
This was primarily a clever way to try to shore up their revenue numbers. By preventing folks who don't have seven-to-twelve-figure bank account balances from using the tools that were most expensive to build, they might actually stand to make money from those tools... once they're forced to do accounting that includes the cost to make those tools.
As a bonus, R&D cost for serving the fixed-price-subscription rabble can be massively reduced by providing them with older tools that have had the goop around them tweaked just enough to make the tool's output have a different "flavor". That class of customer will never know that they're being conned.
“Yet Dario blames public negativity on a long-standing loss of trust in institutions rather than his own messaging.“
Dario’s arrogance and blind spots are really something to behold.
Nobody is worried about any AI company in the abstract the way people are worried about other companies in the abstract (e.g. an oil company might ruin the environment just simply as a byproduct of engaging in their core business).
Everybody worried about their government, their utility companies, their employer, their landlord, all the faceless BigCos they do business with, etc, etc. getting their grubby mitts on AI and then using it to screw them even more than they're already being screwed.
The whole system is set up to screw people right now and it does it as fast and as hard as it can. AI is see as bad to the extent that it lets the screwing happen at a higher tempo.
Or even for the HN crowd, when will we see e.g. "Mythos aided research discovers 10 new viable battery technologies"
Even worse, it has made a significant number of people's lives worse. Some major, like layoffs, some less major, like PC prices, some are just annoyed by AI slop.
And then Dario himself wouldn't stop yapping about white collar work being gone in X years...
Then, proceeds at promising it again, without delivering. Amazing.
> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.
This is fantasy, and I believe the vast majority of those actually working in pharmaceutical R&D would agree. Contrast Amodei's opinion here to the Derek Lowe post I shared recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313367 . Derek Lowe's opinion is closest to my own experience: AI, whether it be traditional ML or LLMs, can help here and there -- the former to help you to triage paths to explore in a way that's a little better than intuition in some cases, the latter mostly to generate code faster in the code-dependent aspects of pharma research -- but neither of these things are significantly widening the main bottlenecks. I don't think the data exists to do so, especially since so much of pharma R&D is looking for higher and higher hanging fruit (i.e. exploring avenues for which a trove of relevant training data does not already exist).
It is so tragicomic to see people whose lives are built around companies coming so close to realizing that everything they do is bad, and then at the last minute swerving aside to convince themselves that no, if they just do more of it and somehow do it "better", then it will all be okay. The reason people don't trust companies and believe they are cooking up some new way to screw them over is because that is what they are doing. If Dario or anyone else really wanted to dispel that perception there's an easy way: do a total 180 and start fighting against everything you've been pushing. But none of them will do that because they still fundamentally believe that what they are doing is good, and are unable to see that fundamentally it's bad.
If only money thirsty capitals didn’t drain the HBM/DRAM/NAND capacity to rush to build out all the data centers so that they can make money off of inference, driving up memory prices like mad man leaving consumers with not only no chance of local inference setup, but also higher price of consumer electronics. Of course it has nothing to do with regulation, more to do with the greed.
For folks who care about quality discussion and writing, it's a tragedy that people are using microblogging tools to publish essays. The length restrictions enforced by and inferior formatting tools provided by these things make it difficult to have serious talks about complex topics.
Of course -for a subset of the population- those limitations are a feature, rather than a bug.
I don't think it's on them. Proximally, it's not their job to deliver the end-use value; it's their customers' job (if they're doing it, it would be a strong sign of tying). More generally, they operate as a commercial SaaS entity (non-profit or not), and net benefit to the world is not what any company is structured for (even public benefit corporations have mainly indirect effects).
So I think that "criticism" is just a back-handed way of promoting themselves in messianic terms.
IMHO Anthropic, OpenAI et al continue the practices that make people resent companies (US companies): You have to be either connected or nominal (show of diversity) to actually participate in the opportunities or protect yourself from their predations. That's just the nature of knowledge work: you need a ladder of opportunities that start very early to participate, and you'd need to understand subtleties of engagement to see how you're being fleeced as a customer. The divide of rich to poor is not about money but both knowledge and access; it's felt even by long-time experts in the field who are left out or ousted.
I'm way more worried about these guys breaking the economy in such a way that enriches them and makes me poorer, than I'm about any existential risk these guys cook up in their thought experiments.
Like if you are making more money than god in silicon valley I guess you don't really fear losing your job or house, but for most people that would be quite bad.
I never hear these guys articulate what their concrete vision for the economy if they make ASI / AGI happen (one of those is the correct shibboleth and I don't remember which).
> "I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world."
> wall of text follows
> doesnt proceed to clearly tell us what the actual picture of the world is, then
- frontier llm access means you are at an economic advantage
- a big risk of this is ongoing wealth concentration
- the "open weights" approach can't solve the problem of wealth and llm access being linked; you need compute too, and compute is expensive, thus "open weights" still favors the wealthy
- instead we need "objective and fair institutional processes", as this will allow small labs cook up their stuff while frontier labs get regulated
why would i care about what these smaller players do, if economic advantage = frontier model access? also, the reasoning around "why bother with open weights because compute is expensive too" seems like the kind of logic a motivated 12 year old could work their way around in 30 seconds. things are not either/or dario, you said so yourself.
seems like a 400 word corpo misdirection essay. par for the course.
To paraphrase Sinclair "It's difficult to make a man realize the issues with regulatory capture, if they're to be the benefactor of regulatory capture".
> A crude analogy is that the formal court system can sometimes feel stuffy and elitist, but it does a much better job of defending the rights of vulnerable individuals than the alternative, mob justice.
Not so sure. After all lack of the latter did help establish the current tech overlord rule.
Especially when said individuals are rich.
The way to do this is with large automated wetlabs running experiments and generating novel training data on the behavior of cells.
It's with partnerships with governments and universities that educate the masses to the point where many of us are better able to contribute towards the project of growing the available knowledge in a useful way.
It's with more NIH funding and fewer anti-science propagandists attacking that funding so they can sell their snake oil without pesky facts getting in the way.
What's actually happening is our data centers are spewing carcinogens into places where humans will breathe them and we're lying to ourselves about how if we just keep going this way we'll cure cancer.
Stop making the world less habitable by trying to squeeze another drop of model utility out of the existing knowledge, and start helping with the creation of new knowledge.
It's going to take decades to ramp up. Let's turn the page and get started.
How can you restore trust by ignoring the past deception, bad will and abuse - Is Dario saying you simply ignore that, and deliver on an outcome later?
If I break my agreements of how to treat people and they do not trust me, it's on me to restore that trust through acting different and showing them I've changed. It takes ownership of my past actions too, not just shoving them under a rug.
> ...
> completely exempt any company below a certain amount of revenue or model training costs from being covered at all
One could argue that "Frontier AI" company know they have nothing to fear from company with less than XM$ revenue, and so their support for this type of regulation is still a way to force regulatory capture. In any case, whatever regulation you support, it's a regulation that you didn't have to handle when you were growing, but that incumbent will have to deal with.
Whatever it is Dario's intention or not does not matter. Capitalism push to consolidation and the eventual regulation that will need to be applied to mitigate the externality from a new industry, will mean that their will only be a handful of "very big" winner. Same story since the beginning of the industrial era. Even if that's not what Dario personally want, it's in the best interest of the shareholders, which will force Anthropic to do everything it can to be one of the big one.
> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws).
The same can be said about a lot of other industry (aviation, oil, chip manufacturing, ...). Every country / union big enough will finance their own champion to try to keep a foot in the industry even if they are not the best.
The tech execs waking up on a random monday:
> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
No shit Dario, no shit...
I’d really appreciate it if folks stopped paying more attention to the bloviating or whinging of AI executives and instead focused exclusively on their actions, for therein lies the true nature of their goals or vision.
Edit: Does anyone else notice the switching between dashes and em-dashes between paragraphs? Tells you a lot about the man, doesn't it.
That he doesn’t know how to use basic word processing, or even agent SKILLS.md or whatever it’s called now. Or maybe it’s just the next generation of vagueposting.
The CEO of Anthropic not using AI extensively would be news.
Or are we still doing the lawfare strat since you can’t get any meaningful lead on Chinese models?
How about the involvement in the Iran bombing that killed 160, out of which 120 were kids?
Forgive me if Anthropic doesn’t really rhyme with trust over here.
He's clearly focusing on being on the news to provoke emotions on people, preparing for the Anthropic big blockbuster IPO.
Dario, Sam Altman and others should instead be praying every night that this will take us to the Singularity VERY SOON, because if it doesn't, the entire country will blame them for absolutely destroying their retirement and the US' economy once this AI Datacenter bubble pops.
The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models.
When Dario talks about open weights not being a solution this is what he means - if you don't have 400GB of VRAM lying around the fact that there's an open model like Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B doesn't really help much. If we're not regulating how models are available, or making sure access is open, then RAM prices will mean everything concentrates on a few very rich companies.
Does it have to be? There are plenty of coding tasks, where it's good enough.
However, if you're having a discussion about access to frontier models, and using Qwen 3.8 as an example of how open weights is a solution, then you should be honest and accurate about what you're talking about. Making an argument like "People can run Qwen 3.8 at home. That shows open weights are great." is a bit disingenuous if you're not also making it clear that you're not talking about Qwen 3.8 Max (or that you have a beast of a PC at home :D ).
I suppose the road to technical hell is paved with marketers and grifters. :)
[1]: https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1:1.5b [2]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-...
Exactly. There are common coding tasks that these models can adequately do. They are absolute trash for anything that isn't coding. And even with coding, they are so, so far behind frontier models.
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is 167 gigabytes from the developer and as a GGUF with no additional quantization. It limps along on my 192GB M2 Mac from several years ago [0]. This model tests better[1] than Claude Opus 4.6 released in February. That's six months ago - what will be available 6 months from now?
https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731/tr...
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-GGUF
So yeah, enthusiasts aren't going to run frontier models on their gaming machines, but a small office could easily justify the $30k - $100k cost to run something like this at high speed. The small company I worked for routinely spent that kind of money on Dec Alphas twenty five years ago, and that's not accounting for inflation adjustment.
And this is completely discounting the advances smaller models are making. You're right that Qwen 3.8 comes in different sizes. However, Qwen 3.8 27B and Qwen 3.6 27B do run on gaming cards, and they're better than the frontier models from twelve months ago.
I have no idea what will happen in the future, but I wouldn't base my guesses solely on the largest open weight models.
[0] Yes, it's unpleasantly slow (5-8 tok/sec)
[1] Yes, benchmarks should be taken with a lot of salt.
Why does this need a master?
Do we regulate bio geniuses for the danger they pose? No, we do not.
Do we regulate other tools like hammers and drills? No. Books? No.
That's putting it mildly, very mildly. The guy all but wrecked the entire world's DRAM supply chain by using negotiation tactics that, if there were any semblance of regulatory authority left in the US, would lead to criminal charges for market manipulation.
Arrest Sam Altman, he is one of the most dangerous people on the planet. Not a single shred of respect for the 99% and the consequences his actions have on them. (And similar things apply to the other controversial figure you mentioned, Elon Musk actively enjoys hurting people by the looks of it.)
Ta-da. Trust crisis solved.
this guy need to stop vibeposting nonsense.
Dario is always deeply worried.
I read somewhere he is the Woody Allen of AI.
Also ... Never read the tweets of your heroes.
Nothing beats the hubris of the Silicon Valley CEOs and self proclaimed “elite”. I’m missing people calling out “we are better than that”… NOT
Basically he is probably a nice guy and well meaning from his point of view. But, now that they hold a huge power to impact "on demand" AI usage and regulation, and they are kind of the tip of a monopoly on advanced AI, they will see themselves as more important than anyone else, and with the moral duty to impose their view on everyone that hasn't the worth as them.
Just imagine if the company was still a small outsider, their official point of view would probably be a lot different. Especially with something like "regulation is a barrier to entry"...
Looks like Amodi is laying the groundwork so he can re-run Eric Schmidt's "but it happened" playbook. Do whatever you can to make money, wait for the dust to settle and walk off into the sunset after one final "whoopie daisy, didn't mean to do that to you. sucks to suck."
Both founders of Anthropic and OpenAI have talked about how AI will replace many jobs, and did so with a sense of doom and urgency.
And yet...they are (pikachu face) surprised that people do not want data centers (which will increase utility costs for consumers) and graduates boo tech leaders at commencement ceremonies?
Tech leaders are clueless.
if claude still can’t yet write and refactor coherent code (on its own, replacing software engs, just like he said last year), why would we expect it to… fucking cure cancer?
Make it "Apologies for linking to Amodei" and we're talking.
I hope they have better sandboxes in their biology lab than they did in their cyber security lab.
More seriously, these sociopaths will soon release lab-made viruses into the world to prove AI's capability and to force governments into regulation of open models. It should be obvious by now that with their savior complex, the goals (cure cancer, AI safety, save humanity) justify any means.
It's not quite Sam Altman levels of delusional, but it's up there.
This is not how to swing the pendulum back in a positive direction.
Want to make a difference? Make AI use little to no natural resources, stop eating up RAM, stop making everything expensive, etc. Otherwise, don't talk.
I guess it’ll be great for Anthropic to have the cure for cancer, but what’s that gonna mean for people with cancer? Funny how he doesn’t talk about that part.
Oh gosh, I can't imagine why that might be, could it be the history of screwing us over?
If you want to build trust, I have a simple suggestion that Anthropic or OpenAI could implement today, if they wanted, and it would make me trust them probably 1000x more than I do today. That change is quite simple: stop selling to governments and enterprise. If you really believe in this product, you can earn enough money from regular people, you don't need government money and you don't need to sell to those corporations we don't trust. Just sell it only to individuals directly and add in your TOS that no company can force employees to use your product, or you won't sell it to anyone who works there anymore. This would strongly signal that you don't want AI to concentrate power, since you won't sell it to concentrations of power. It would build a lot of trust.
Oh, you want to "cure cancer" instead? Of course you do. Why am I backing away slowly? Maybe because I'm pretty sure you're cooking up a way to screw me.