kalkin

> The code is not eligible for copyright.

This is very much not what the linked case established.

Lots of things are wrong with giving people the power to make choices that affect the whole world, while excluding others who are equally or more affected, based on where they happened to be born.

If the logic is that people who are born somewhere else shouldn't have any agency over immigration laws, well, why does someone who lives in some town in my country with a negligible immigrant population get a say in who I and my colleagues can invite to work with us, and who I and my neighbors can invite to live with us?

Yes, she addresses this by denying that she's made any empirical hypothesis, but in a way that's some combination of disingenuous and confused.

She also says:

> What I am trying to do... is to help people understand what these systems actually are

Can a phrase that has no empirical content aid people in understanding an empirical phenomenon?

> the astonishing willingness of so many to... turn to synthetic text... for all kinds of weighty decisions.

Why is this astonishing, if the nature of these models as "stochastic parrots" places no limitations whatosever on their empirical capabilities, reliability, etc?

> the field of linguistics is particularly relevant in this moment, as a linguist’s eye view on language technology is desperately needed to help make wise decisions about how we do and don’t use these products

Is it wise to make decisions about a product on the basis of information that has no relevance to how it is actually likely to behave?

(It may be, if one has ethical concerns with "data theft, the exploitative labor practices", etc -- but one could have such concerns about any kind of product, not just a "stochastic parrot", and linguists are not generally academia's experts on, e.g., labor practices.)

> The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value)

I think this argument proves too much. Historically energy shocks have led to recessions, and in recessions the stock market usually doesn't go up. And the US economy is certainly exposed to global recession regardless of whether we're a net exporter of fossil fuels.

I mean, there's a reason I started with a distancing phrase about a "reasonable argument"; I think what I'm suggesting is an interesting lens but does not capture the whole picture.

But also, even if bust is business as usual in the big picture and not a social disaster long term, it's of course not what individual investors want for their particular current investments.

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis:

The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence.

And what are the possible outcomes?

- Bust. We've come away with a useful tool but the hundreds of billions of capital expenditure were thrown away on a pipe dream.

- Success! We're the dog that's caught the car. Then what? Currently the political debate is, to caricature only slightly, between "oh no the datacenters will use more water than golf courses" and "lol what are you going to do, regulate matrix multiplication?". How the hell are we going to cope with introducing a new intelligent species?

Either way, it sure seems like we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity. What is this, if not a sort of psychosis?

There are a lot of valid reasons to hate AI, but I don't think "morale of Meta engineers" is a very good one. What were they building? Maybe it was fun--some fun tech seems to have come out of Meta--but what was its social impact? On teenage mental health? On politics and the electorate in the US? On the Rohingya? And they meanwhile they were compensated very well for years.

It's really not clear to me how MAGA people getting scammed will encourage their world view, or that there's meaningful room for further embittering them. Maybe, but perhaps they'll be discouraged! Or perhaps they'll have less money to give to actually sincere MAGA activists who will do something bad with it!

To be clear, I don't think the law should tolerate scams of this kind, or that policy should encourage them in any way. But empathy for the victims is an ask on top of policy, and "maybe there will be some bad indirect effects" is a weak argument for it.

I think it's often entirely reasonable to shed one's empathy for someone who displays no empathy for people like you. Tit-for-tat isn't always the best policy, but it's not psychopathic either.

A considerable portion of the AI-girl rhetoric quoted in the article is specifically denigrating liberals. It would be very generous and possibly laudable of liberals to nevertheless feel empathy for the people falling for it, but I think it's pretty understandable if most don't. And I'm not even convinced it's laudable; there's a particular tendency in US media discourse to assign moral responsibility to liberals, but not conservatives, so that liberals are supposed to empathize with MAGA voters and endeavor to understand their values but it's just normal and accepted that Republicans think liberal cities are hellholes that deserve to burn. This asymmetry isn't healthy, even if I'd rather it be resolved by a general increase in empathy than a decrease.

That's valid, but it's also worth knowing it's only one part of the puzzle. The submission title doesn't say "input".

AFAICT this uses a token-counting API so that it counts how many tokens are in the prompt, in two ways, so it's measuring the tokenizer change in isolation. Smarter models also sometimes produce shorter outputs and therefore fewer output tokens. That doesn't mean Opus 4.7 necessarily nets out cheaper, it might still be more expensive, but this comparison isn't really very useful.

I'm willing to believe this but the explanation given in the article doesn't make sense to me:

> When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.

What? There's no rule that every item sold by a megacorp has to "move the needle." If I order some unscented shampoo from Amazon that doesn't move the needle for Bezos, and neither do all the orders for that particular brand put together.

Ok, good to have that explanation. Your larger point, though, remains incoherent. Whether Anthropic saw this coming has nothing to do with the substance of the conflict here and is very much not "the real question".

Companies have to comply with subpoenas (unless they can beat them in court, and with an alternative of going to jail). Subpoenas are supposed to be targeted at individuals and need some kind of process, usually judicial, each time one is issued. Mass surveillance - the Anthropic blog post raises the possibility of using AI to classify the political loyalties of every citizen - is a different thing.

A subpoena isn't mass surveillance.

I already suspected the first comment was by an LLM, but deleted that from my reply as it didn't feel like a productive accusation. However, with "that's a fair point" as an opener, plus the sheer typing speed implied by replies, and the way that individual sentences thread together even as the larger point is incoherent, I'm now confident enough to call it.

What do subpoenas have to do with anything?

Where is all the weird misinformation in these comments coming from?

It's not recent news that Anthropic has (had?) DoD contracts. This is a lot of words to write while seeming ignorant of basic facts about the situation.

I think Scott Alexander (of all people) got the number of the tech-right Trump defenders on this one: https://xcancel.com/slatestarcodex/status/202741423748490451...

> petite bourgeoisie clutching their pearls

> mean girl slights

I'm providing information for other readers to evaluate your good faith, or lack thereof.

It appears that when it comes to Jesse Jackson you're entirely capable of understanding how a shakedown works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47046514

> Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy... Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error...

This is just totally disconnected from policy reality. Biden did not tolerate mass border crossings. (I _wish_ he'd dismantled ICE, but he very clearly did not.) A relatively minor DoE appointment going to a member of an unpopular minority both has nothing to do with policy and is the kind of thing that must necessarily be acceptable if minorities are actually going to be "treated equally under the law". This is a ludicrous basis to infer "the subservience of the political class" to transgender people.

On the other hand, Trump is a billionaire with Epstein connections and entirely unabashed about making money for his businesses and family using his government position. If this isn't "decadence", or "elitism", what meaning could the words possibly have?

"Deprogramming" might be an unfriendly word but it's hard for me to imagine how you have a functional democracy when a plurality of voters are making decisions on the basis of straightforward falsehoods, or even inversions of reality, just because "at least that is the perception". This isn't a sustainable situation, and it will end with either re-connecting these people to reality or disenfranchising them (really, them disenfranchising themselves along with the rest of us, e.g. by re-empowering someone who tried to steal an election). The former seems vastly preferable.

Speaking of unfriendly words - I also broadly have very little sympathy for a demand that people on the left speak respectfully of Trump voters given the total lack of any reciprocation. Even if it is the right way to do politics, the asymmetry between the way Democratic politicians talk about rural areas and the way Republican politicians talk about cities is another thing that's totally unsustainable.

I'm curious for your understanding of why Trump won in 2024. If I'm understanding right, you think it was because American voters were rejecting Maoism ("it was called re-education"), to which you think the previous commenter likely subscribes, and which voters associated with Harris/Walz? But I suspect I'm not getting it quite right, and it would be helpful if you would spell out what you mean, rather than just relying on allusion.

(I myself don't have a clear answer to why Trump won, but I don't think it speaks well to the decision-making of the median voter on their own terms, whatever those were, that Trump's now so unpopular despite governing in pretty much the way he said he would.)

What percentage of voters do you think want the Pentagon to institute an AI-powered domestic mass surveillance program?

> That is the best definition I've yet to read.

If this was your takeaway, read more carefully:

> If something claims to be conscious and we can't prove it's not, we have no choice but to believe it.

Consciousness is neither sufficient, nor, at least conceptually, necessary, for any given level of intelligence.

It would be pretty arrogant, I think, though possibly classic tech-bro behavior, for Anthropic to say, "you know what, smart people who've spent their whole lives thinking and debating about this don't have any agreement on what's required for consciousness, but we're good at engineering so we can just say that some of those people are idiots and we can give their conclusions zero credence."

If a human is ultimately made up of nothing more than particles obeying the laws of physics, it would be in principle possible to simulate one on paper. Completely impractical, but the same is true of simulating Claude by hand (presuming Anthropic doesn't have some kind of insane secret efficiency breakthrough which allows many orders of magnitude fewer flops to run Claude than other models, which they're cleverly disguising by buying billions of dollars of compute they don't need).

This basically Searle's Chinese Room argument. It's got a respectable history (... Searle's personal ethics aside) but it's not something that has produced any kind of consensus among philosophers. Note that it would apply to any AI instantiated as a Turing machine and to a simulation of human brain at an arbitrary level of detail as well.

There is a section on the Chinese Room argument in the book.

(I personally am skeptical that LLMs have any conscious experience. I just don't think it's a ridiculous question.)

He talks pretty specifically about what he means by "the architectures many consciousness scientists associate with conscious systems" - Global Workspace theory, Higher Order theory and Integrated Information theory. This is on the second and third pages of the intro chapter.

You seem to be confusing the training task with the architecture. Next-token prediction is a task, which many architectures can do, including human brains (although we're worse at it than LLMs).

Note that some of the theories Schwitzgebel cites would, in his reading, require sensors and/or recurrence for consciousness, which a plain transformer doesn't have. But neither is hard to add in principle, and Anthropic like its competitors doesn't make public what architectural changes it might have made in the last few years.