The company released six internal case studies where none of the issues affected real users.
This is the most interesting point to me. What are they not releasing that has affected real users? We’ve seen some individual reports from people (eg AI wiped my HD).
Imagine how pervasively they'd have to monitor what their users are doing to pick up on that whenever it happens. The people affected that way will have to report on it themselves.
(OpenAI does occasionally report on malicious use though. [1] That shows they do some monitoring.)
why would that be the case? it's not true for top secret defense contractors today. and the frontier labs already operate in the dark, openness is a liability.
nationalization to me simply means the government is their main customer and stakeholder, and shield them from liability, governance, and openness. not that the frontier labs become part of the government per se.
eans the government is their main customer and stakeholder, and shield them from liability, governance, and openness
I personally believe they already have this, why would the current government at least want to formalize this when it can have it with no public discussion.
they will. to shield from oversight, liability and profitability concerns, and to ensure unimpeded rapid development, with the frontier only being available to elite (not you). definitely not to add transparency.
the frontier labs are the new top secret defense contractors.
I find it even harder to trust elected leaders from any party. At least Sam and Dario are aligned with a value set that is understood and clear, whereas political leaders values changes as do the polls their livelihood depends on changes.
No system of governance can deal with immense concentration of power. The US Constitution was about separation of powers. Democracy is about (in theory at least) giving each person a meaningful say in their own governance, which in turn implies not allowing any single person to become too powerful.
Political leaders become a problem when they amass too much power. Corporations become a problem when they amass too much power. It doesn't matter what Sam and Dario's purported values are. They aspire to power and absolutely power always corrupts absolutely.
Technologies which are infinitely powerful or whose power grows too quickly outrun any reasonable attempt at regulation. If you imagine that tomorrow everyone were given a tank, we might think, "alright, everyone has a tank so it's not too bad." But humans are squishy, and our houses are (relatively) squishy compared to tanks. Substantial collateral damage would result from everyone having a tank, and it seems likely that substantial collateral damage will result from everyone having a cyberterrorism-capable slop machine.
Democracy is about (in theory at least) giving each person a meaningful say in their own governance, which in turn implies not allowing any single person to become too powerful.
this is "direct democracy" and it's not even close to exist in USA... even with that a society can allow powerful people to exist if they don't create any law forbidding that
It's interesting the cyberpunk-esque future we're sliding into. Things like cognito-hazards and information-hazards are legitimately discussed and researched problems we're experiencing.
It's going to be interesting on how humanity deals with this problem (well, or if we turn it over to AI and make it their problem and suffer whatever consequences falls out). Being able to gather further information and power by acting on the information you already have causing massive power imbalances that is very hard to deal with, it's a natural outcome.
At least Sam and Dario are aligned with a value set that is understood and clear
What value set do you perceive that to be, and why would you take your perception of it to be any more sound than it would be with a politician?
It's not like someone can operate companies of that scale, especially startups, through earnestness and openness. Like national politics, their job is fundamentally about perception management and power brokering across dynamic windows of opportunity. Nothing they say or do can be taken at face value, and you can't reduce their incentives to either company or personal profit in any particular form over any particular time scale.
I feel like many of Anthropic's issues are due to Dario being too earnest and open. It's both refreshing (that a CEO has thought deeply about and is willing to talk publicly about the dangers of their product) and depressing (that so many people cynically think this is some sort of marketing ploy).
Yes it's clear that Sam and Dario seem to be aligned with a value set that prioritizes concentrating trans-national government-mandated centralized control of AI and crowning themselves high priests of this unholy abomination. "At least it's clear that they're aiming to bring hell on earth" -- hard disagree, I think we can aim significantly higher.
I find it even harder to trust elected leaders from any party.
You can vote out an elected leader, but not Sam and Dario. It's very weird that you're so willing to give up any kind of power and want to be ruled by unelected billionaires who only want to take advantage of you at every opportunity.
The nature of the US state is such that the distinction between nationalized and not is almost meaningless.
Like Lockheed-Martin or Boeing, etc. there's just interpenetration between the corporate boardroom and the state. They act in each other's mutual interests.
The Chinese system is just more explicit and open about this.
And as a non-American, I can't trust the US state anymore than I can trust its dominant corporate entities. So I fail to see the advantage to the world to it being nationalized. In fact under the current administration this would be an even worse outcome.
You're taking companies that work almost exclusively for the US government and represent a tiny portion of the US economy as representing all US companies?
Not all companies have a concentration of power. The government has no mutual interest in those companies. Now, when you talk about things in the F100 the situation changes drastically. If you produce things like planes, weapons, and weaponization of software you are talking about something completely different in kind.
What's with all this make believe delusional bullshit? The LLM is not gonna wake up and become AI. Get real guys.
[edit] to be clear, I believe regulation is necessary and urgently important for the software engineering field. The damage being done by the unregulated psychological experiments run by social media and adtech companies is awful and should be curtailed. Engineers should be held personally, professionally, and legally liable for what they produce. But we don't need to invent imaginary bogeymen to do it.
We have no reason to believe a word they say. We know they're incentivized to lie about "dangers" and act alarmist, Anthropic has been doing it for years now. Aside from that, just because you can burn down a village with fire doesn't mean fire is the devil. Maybe they should consider acting responsibly.
Am I the only one who dislikes the term "misalignment"?
On one front it implies the model has a "mind of its own" (whether it does or not is besides the point). Why do we perceive human judgement as somehow more trustworthy than that of a model? I feel like I've experienced human misalignment somewhat regularly in life.
On another front I'm failing to conceptualize how alignment can be objective. How can you measure alignment when reasonable people will disagree whether actions are aligned or not? All the time I see humans operating in different zones of alignment with whatever goal they're trying to achieve and I suspect it's even a feature (socially) that we have people calibrated differently.
Do I want a model that's trying to push the boundaries of scientific understanding to be aligned strictly with the current dogmatic thinking? Or do I want it to "get creative" and think outside the box?
It seems to me more like accountability is the issue.
This is the most interesting point to me. What are they not releasing that has affected real users? We’ve seen some individual reports from people (eg AI wiped my HD).
Imagine how pervasively they'd have to monitor what their users are doing to pick up on that whenever it happens. The people affected that way will have to report on it themselves.
(OpenAI does occasionally report on malicious use though. [1] That shows they do some monitoring.)
[1] https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-ai-uses/
OpenAI and Anthropic should be nationalized. I find it difficult to trust Sam Altman or Dario Amodei.
and you trust the government?
not this one
Even better: force them to release weights.
who even has the inventive to do that? certainly not the government.
Even better: force them to release every scrap of data they trained their AI on.
I guess that's one way to guarantee development slows down to a crawl, but in no way would it increase trust.
why would that be the case? it's not true for top secret defense contractors today. and the frontier labs already operate in the dark, openness is a liability.
nationalization to me simply means the government is their main customer and stakeholder, and shield them from liability, governance, and openness. not that the frontier labs become part of the government per se.
I personally believe they already have this, why would the current government at least want to formalize this when it can have it with no public discussion.
Well we can say whatever we want if we have our own definitions for everything, no?
they will. to shield from oversight, liability and profitability concerns, and to ensure unimpeded rapid development, with the frontier only being available to elite (not you). definitely not to add transparency.
the frontier labs are the new top secret defense contractors.
I find it even harder to trust elected leaders from any party. At least Sam and Dario are aligned with a value set that is understood and clear, whereas political leaders values changes as do the polls their livelihood depends on changes.
How could we possibly know this?
What do you think their value set is if not "gimme more money"? Seems pretty clear cut to me.
No system of governance can deal with immense concentration of power. The US Constitution was about separation of powers. Democracy is about (in theory at least) giving each person a meaningful say in their own governance, which in turn implies not allowing any single person to become too powerful.
Political leaders become a problem when they amass too much power. Corporations become a problem when they amass too much power. It doesn't matter what Sam and Dario's purported values are. They aspire to power and absolutely power always corrupts absolutely.
Technologies which are infinitely powerful or whose power grows too quickly outrun any reasonable attempt at regulation. If you imagine that tomorrow everyone were given a tank, we might think, "alright, everyone has a tank so it's not too bad." But humans are squishy, and our houses are (relatively) squishy compared to tanks. Substantial collateral damage would result from everyone having a tank, and it seems likely that substantial collateral damage will result from everyone having a cyberterrorism-capable slop machine.
this is "direct democracy" and it's not even close to exist in USA... even with that a society can allow powerful people to exist if they don't create any law forbidding that
Nearly everyone in the US has a giant car that is basically a tank.
They are dangerous. But it’s managed.
Centralized power never works. We have the worst times in history to look at.
Nationalization just centralizes to a different set of people. It’s personal ownership or oppression.
We all need open weight R2D2s.
It's interesting the cyberpunk-esque future we're sliding into. Things like cognito-hazards and information-hazards are legitimately discussed and researched problems we're experiencing.
It's going to be interesting on how humanity deals with this problem (well, or if we turn it over to AI and make it their problem and suffer whatever consequences falls out). Being able to gather further information and power by acting on the information you already have causing massive power imbalances that is very hard to deal with, it's a natural outcome.
What value set do you perceive that to be, and why would you take your perception of it to be any more sound than it would be with a politician?
It's not like someone can operate companies of that scale, especially startups, through earnestness and openness. Like national politics, their job is fundamentally about perception management and power brokering across dynamic windows of opportunity. Nothing they say or do can be taken at face value, and you can't reduce their incentives to either company or personal profit in any particular form over any particular time scale.
A meat based paperclip maximizer.
I feel like many of Anthropic's issues are due to Dario being too earnest and open. It's both refreshing (that a CEO has thought deeply about and is willing to talk publicly about the dangers of their product) and depressing (that so many people cynically think this is some sort of marketing ploy).
Yes it's clear that Sam and Dario seem to be aligned with a value set that prioritizes concentrating trans-national government-mandated centralized control of AI and crowning themselves high priests of this unholy abomination. "At least it's clear that they're aiming to bring hell on earth" -- hard disagree, I think we can aim significantly higher.
At least politicians are somewhat beholden to their constituents. What keeps Sam and Dario in line other than profit?
I find it even, even harder to trust your opinion in this context with a business that has “AI powered” at the top of the landing page.
You can vote out an elected leader, but not Sam and Dario. It's very weird that you're so willing to give up any kind of power and want to be ruled by unelected billionaires who only want to take advantage of you at every opportunity.
Makes sense let’s trust Donald Trump instead
a maliciously engineered dichotomy
The nature of the US state is such that the distinction between nationalized and not is almost meaningless.
Like Lockheed-Martin or Boeing, etc. there's just interpenetration between the corporate boardroom and the state. They act in each other's mutual interests.
The Chinese system is just more explicit and open about this.
And as a non-American, I can't trust the US state anymore than I can trust its dominant corporate entities. So I fail to see the advantage to the world to it being nationalized. In fact under the current administration this would be an even worse outcome.
You're taking companies that work almost exclusively for the US government and represent a tiny portion of the US economy as representing all US companies?
This is a weird contextual failure on your part.
Not all companies have a concentration of power. The government has no mutual interest in those companies. Now, when you talk about things in the F100 the situation changes drastically. If you produce things like planes, weapons, and weaponization of software you are talking about something completely different in kind.
i think the lower bound on the end state is there cant be opaque reasonibg steps ever.
What's with all this make believe delusional bullshit? The LLM is not gonna wake up and become AI. Get real guys.
[edit] to be clear, I believe regulation is necessary and urgently important for the software engineering field. The damage being done by the unregulated psychological experiments run by social media and adtech companies is awful and should be curtailed. Engineers should be held personally, professionally, and legally liable for what they produce. But we don't need to invent imaginary bogeymen to do it.
We have no reason to believe a word they say. We know they're incentivized to lie about "dangers" and act alarmist, Anthropic has been doing it for years now. Aside from that, just because you can burn down a village with fire doesn't mean fire is the devil. Maybe they should consider acting responsibly.
This entire situation is such a huge PR disaster that you have to wonder what the initial expectations from these founders were about a decade ago.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737503
Am I the only one who dislikes the term "misalignment"?
On one front it implies the model has a "mind of its own" (whether it does or not is besides the point). Why do we perceive human judgement as somehow more trustworthy than that of a model? I feel like I've experienced human misalignment somewhat regularly in life.
On another front I'm failing to conceptualize how alignment can be objective. How can you measure alignment when reasonable people will disagree whether actions are aligned or not? All the time I see humans operating in different zones of alignment with whatever goal they're trying to achieve and I suspect it's even a feature (socially) that we have people calibrated differently.
Do I want a model that's trying to push the boundaries of scientific understanding to be aligned strictly with the current dogmatic thinking? Or do I want it to "get creative" and think outside the box?
It seems to me more like accountability is the issue.