I’m coming to this late, but this seems weird. Do I understand correctly that many people were saying that Anthropic, the AI research company, had committed never to advance the state of the art of AI research, and they believed Anthropic would follow this commitment? That is just… really implausible.
This is the sort of commitment which very few individuals are psychologically capable of keeping, and which ~zero commercial organizations of more than three or four people are institutionally capable of keeping, assuming they actually do have the ability to advance the state of the art. I don’t know whether Anthropic leadership ever said they would do this, and if they said it then I don’t know whether they meant it earnestly. But even imagining they said it and meant it earnestly there is just no plausible world in which a company with hundreds of staff and billions of dollars of commercial investment would keep this commitment for very long. That is not the sort of thing you see from commercial research companies in hot fields.
If anyone here did believe that Anthropic would voluntarily refrain from advancing the state of the art in all cases, you might want to check if there are other things that people have told you about themselves, which you would really like to be true of them, but you have no evidence for other than their assertions, and would be very unusual if they were true.
I also strongly expected them to violate this commitment, though my understanding is that various investors and early collaborators did believe they would keep this commitment.
I think it’s important to understand that Anthropic was founded before the recent post-Chat-GPT hype/AI-interest-explosion. Similarly to how OpenAIs charter seemed plausible as something that OpenAI could adhere to for people early on, so did it seem possible that commercial pressures would not cause a fully-throated arms-race between all the top companies, with billions to trillions of dollars for the taking for whoever got to AGI first, which I do agree made violating this commitment a relatively likely conclusion.
I’m coming to this late, but this seems weird. Do I understand correctly that many people were saying that Anthropic, the AI research company, had committed never to advance the state of the art of AI research, and they believed Anthropic would follow this commitment? That is just… really implausible.
This is the sort of commitment which very few individuals are psychologically capable of keeping, and which ~zero commercial organizations of more than three or four people are institutionally capable of keeping, assuming they actually do have the ability to advance the state of the art. I don’t know whether Anthropic leadership ever said they would do this, and if they said it then I don’t know whether they meant it earnestly. But even imagining they said it and meant it earnestly there is just no plausible world in which a company with hundreds of staff and billions of dollars of commercial investment would keep this commitment for very long. That is not the sort of thing you see from commercial research companies in hot fields.
If anyone here did believe that Anthropic would voluntarily refrain from advancing the state of the art in all cases, you might want to check if there are other things that people have told you about themselves, which you would really like to be true of them, but you have no evidence for other than their assertions, and would be very unusual if they were true.
I also strongly expected them to violate this commitment, though my understanding is that various investors and early collaborators did believe they would keep this commitment.
I think it’s important to understand that Anthropic was founded before the recent post-Chat-GPT hype/AI-interest-explosion. Similarly to how OpenAIs charter seemed plausible as something that OpenAI could adhere to for people early on, so did it seem possible that commercial pressures would not cause a fully-throated arms-race between all the top companies, with billions to trillions of dollars for the taking for whoever got to AGI first, which I do agree made violating this commitment a relatively likely conclusion.