In two days (March 21st, 12-4pm), about 140 of us (event link) will be marching on Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI in SF asking the CEOs to make statements on whether they would stop developing new frontier models if every other major lab in the world credibly does the same. This comes after Anthropic removed its commitment to pause development from their RSP.
We’ll be starting at 500 Howard St, San Francisco (Anthropic’s Office, full schedule and more info here). This is shaping to be the biggest US AI Safety protest to date, with a coalition including Nate Soares (MIRI), David Krueger (Evitable), Will Fithian (Berkeley Professor) and folks representing PauseAI, QuitGPT, Humans First.
I do think it deserves to be called quiet. For instance, it seems like they waited until the peak of the news cycle about their conflict with the US government to release this update, and I suspect that was intentional, and also that this worked. In the same week they dropped their core safety commitments, Anthropic was mostly hailed as a hero for standing up to the government; they got almost entirely good press.
But also, Holden’s post explaining the decision is around as understated as a post like that could be. He tried to frame it as something closer to “just another update,” and it was not even the central focus of the post (which I really think it ought to have been, given the gravity of it). The fact that Anthropic was reneging on the core promise of their RSP was systematically downplayed, as it has continued to be by many Anthropic employees who maintain that dropping all “if-thens” from their if-then framework does not meaningfully constitute violating it.
I don’t want this to be a semantics argument about what the word “quiet” means. I will only claim that the Holden post is an important piece of information, both for encouraging Anthropic to be more open and for being evidence against the claim that Anthropic did not want people to know or talk about the relaxation of its safety framework, and further that the description of Anthropic’s behavior as “quiet” gives people a skewed picture of events and does not encourage such prosocial aspects of Anthropic’s behavior.
For instance, it seems like they waited until the peak of the news cycle about their conflict with the US government to release this update, and I suspect that was intentional, and also that this worked.
It happened a few days before the “peak”—it was at a point where barely anyone was paying attention to that particular conflict. Would bet against this being strategically timed[1] at 5:1, if we could reasonably operationalize and figure out a sufficient resolution criteria. (My current model is that Holden is the owner of that project, and would have been responsible for pressing the button on the announcement, and I don’t believe Holden would do that, or knowingly take instruction to do that. Most of my probability mass on what you said being the case lies in worlds where someone else was responsible for the timing of the release, somehow.)
Would not bet against a claim of the form “they didn’t change the timing of the announcement the way they would have done if the announcement had been about something they wanted to see discussion of, like a new model release”.
“140 of us”—I wouldn’t lock in this number. People could fail to show or way more could show up (I registered but might come with +2). I’d say 140 are registered ;) Maybe there will be 300!
Yeah, some people who have been flyering for this have noticed that most people just take a picture of the flyer & don’t bother to actually RSVP to the protest (sometimes for privacy reasons). We’ll see how many people end up coming!
For Mox events, our rule of thumb is that attendance is 100% of Partiful Goings, or 50% of Luma RSVPs. Obviously a protest/march may have different dynamics, but this method would forecast ~120 participants.
Dumb question, why do this on a weekend instead of a weekday? I imagine a lot more employees show up on weekdays (though maybe protestors are more available on weekends and maximizing crowd size is important?)
In two days (March 21st, 12-4pm), about 140 of us (event link) will be marching on Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI in SF asking the CEOs to make statements on whether they would stop developing new frontier models if every other major lab in the world credibly does the same. This comes after Anthropic removed its commitment to pause development from their RSP.
We’ll be starting at 500 Howard St, San Francisco (Anthropic’s Office, full schedule and more info here). This is shaping to be the biggest US AI Safety protest to date, with a coalition including Nate Soares (MIRI), David Krueger (Evitable), Will Fithian (Berkeley Professor) and folks representing PauseAI, QuitGPT, Humans First.
fwiw I don’t think they “quietly” removed their commitment to pause development, Holden wrote a big LessWrong post justifying the recent changes.
I do think it deserves to be called quiet. For instance, it seems like they waited until the peak of the news cycle about their conflict with the US government to release this update, and I suspect that was intentional, and also that this worked. In the same week they dropped their core safety commitments, Anthropic was mostly hailed as a hero for standing up to the government; they got almost entirely good press.
But also, Holden’s post explaining the decision is around as understated as a post like that could be. He tried to frame it as something closer to “just another update,” and it was not even the central focus of the post (which I really think it ought to have been, given the gravity of it). The fact that Anthropic was reneging on the core promise of their RSP was systematically downplayed, as it has continued to be by many Anthropic employees who maintain that dropping all “if-thens” from their if-then framework does not meaningfully constitute violating it.
I don’t want this to be a semantics argument about what the word “quiet” means. I will only claim that the Holden post is an important piece of information, both for encouraging Anthropic to be more open and for being evidence against the claim that Anthropic did not want people to know or talk about the relaxation of its safety framework, and further that the description of Anthropic’s behavior as “quiet” gives people a skewed picture of events and does not encourage such prosocial aspects of Anthropic’s behavior.
It happened a few days before the “peak”—it was at a point where barely anyone was paying attention to that particular conflict. Would bet against this being strategically timed[1] at 5:1, if we could reasonably operationalize and figure out a sufficient resolution criteria. (My current model is that Holden is the owner of that project, and would have been responsible for pressing the button on the announcement, and I don’t believe Holden would do that, or knowingly take instruction to do that. Most of my probability mass on what you said being the case lies in worlds where someone else was responsible for the timing of the release, somehow.)
Would not bet against a claim of the form “they didn’t change the timing of the announcement the way they would have done if the announcement had been about something they wanted to see discussion of, like a new model release”.
Removed the quietly and linked to Holden’s post, thanks!
I’ll be there!
“140 of us”—I wouldn’t lock in this number. People could fail to show or way more could show up (I registered but might come with +2). I’d say 140 are registered ;) Maybe there will be 300!
Yeah, some people who have been flyering for this have noticed that most people just take a picture of the flyer & don’t bother to actually RSVP to the protest (sometimes for privacy reasons). We’ll see how many people end up coming!
For Mox events, our rule of thumb is that attendance is 100% of Partiful Goings, or 50% of Luma RSVPs. Obviously a protest/march may have different dynamics, but this method would forecast ~120 participants.
Dumb question, why do this on a weekend instead of a weekday? I imagine a lot more employees show up on weekdays (though maybe protestors are more available on weekends and maximizing crowd size is important?)
More people show up on weekends yeah
I think plenty of their researchers work on the weekends too – trying to end the world must be quite the motivation