I just want to chime in here as someone who just posted an article, today, that covers interpretability research, primarily by academic researchers, but with Anthropic researchers also playing a key contributor to the story. (I had no idea these posts would come out on the same day.)
I just want to say that I very much appreciate and endorse this kind of post, and I think Anthropic employees should too; and I’m guessing that many of them do. It may be a trite cliche, but it’s simply true; with great power comes great responsibility, and there are a lot of reasons to question what the company Anthropic (and other large AI companies) are doing.
As a science journalist, I also have to say that I especially endorse questioning people who would describe themselves as journalists—including myself—on their roles in such matters. The whole point of labelling yourself as a journalist is to try to clarify the principled nature of your work, and it is very unclear to me how anyone can sustain those principles in certain contexts, like working at Anthropic.
That said, generally speaking, I also want to note something of my personal views, which is that I see ethics as being extremely complicated; it’s just simply true that we humans live in a space of actions that is often deeply ethically flawed and contradictory. And I believe we need to make space for these contradictions (within reason … which we should all be trying to figure out, together), and there’s really no other way of going through things. But I think fair efforts to hold people and organizations accountable should almost universally tend to be welcomed and encouraged, not discouraged.
I just want to chime in here as someone who just posted an article, today, that covers interpretability research, primarily by academic researchers, but with Anthropic researchers also playing a key contributor to the story. (I had no idea these posts would come out on the same day.)
I just want to say that I very much appreciate and endorse this kind of post, and I think Anthropic employees should too; and I’m guessing that many of them do. It may be a trite cliche, but it’s simply true; with great power comes great responsibility, and there are a lot of reasons to question what the company Anthropic (and other large AI companies) are doing.
As a science journalist, I also have to say that I especially endorse questioning people who would describe themselves as journalists—including myself—on their roles in such matters. The whole point of labelling yourself as a journalist is to try to clarify the principled nature of your work, and it is very unclear to me how anyone can sustain those principles in certain contexts, like working at Anthropic.
That said, generally speaking, I also want to note something of my personal views, which is that I see ethics as being extremely complicated; it’s just simply true that we humans live in a space of actions that is often deeply ethically flawed and contradictory. And I believe we need to make space for these contradictions (within reason … which we should all be trying to figure out, together), and there’s really no other way of going through things. But I think fair efforts to hold people and organizations accountable should almost universally tend to be welcomed and encouraged, not discouraged.