I think that if you have a knack for ordinary software development, one application of that is to work at a tech company whose product already has or eventually obtains widespread adoption. This provides you with a platform where there is a straightforward path towards helping improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide by a small amount. Claude has around ~20-50 million monthly active users, and for most users it appears to be beneficial overall, so I believe that this criterion is met by Anthropic.
If you capture a small fraction of the value that you generate as a competent member of a reasonably effective team, then that often leads to substantial financial returns, and I think this is fair since the skillset and focus required to successfully plan and execute on such projects is quite rare. The bar for technical hires at a frontier lab is highly competitive, which commands equally competitive compensation in a market economy. You almost certainly had to clear a relatively higher bar (though one with less legible criteria) to be invited as an early investor. Capital appreciation is the standard reward for backing the production of a reliable and valuable service that others depend upon.
If you buy into the opportunity in AGI deployment, even the lower bounds of mundane utility can be one of the most leveraged ways to do good in the world. Given the dangers of ASI development, improvements to the safety and alignment of AGI systems can prevent profound harm, and the importance of this cannot be understated. Even in the counterfactual scenario where Anthropic was never founded, the urgency of such work would still be critical. There is some established precedent for handling a profitable industry with negative externalities (tobacco, petroleum, advertising) and it would be consistent to include the semiconductor industry in this category. I agree that existing frameworks are insufficient for making reasonable decisions about catastrophic risks. These worries have shaped my career working in AI safety, and a majority of the people here share your concerns.
However, I’m uncertain whether vilifying any small group of people would be the right move to achieve the strategic goals of the AI safety community. For example, Igor Babushchkin’s recent transition from xAI to Babuschkin Ventures could have been complicated by an attitude of hostility towards the founders and early investors of AGI companies. Since nuanced communication doesn’t work at scale, adopting this as our public position might inadvertently increase the likelihood of pivotal acts being committed by rogue threat actors, with inevitable media backlash identifying rationalist/EA people as culpable for “publishing radicalizing material”. But taken seriously, that would be a fully general argument against the distribution of online material warning of existential risks from advanced AI, and being dumb enough to be vulnerable to making that sort of error tends to exclude you from being in positions where your failures can cause any real damage, so I think my real contention with such objections is not on strategy, but on principle.
I’d be much more comfortable with accountability falling to the level of the faceless corporate entity rather than on individual members of the organization, because even senior employees with a lot of influence on paper might have limited agency in carrying out the demands of their role, and I think it would be best to follow the convention set by criticism such as Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its Safety Commitments and ryan_greenblatt’s Shortform which doesn’t single out executives or researchers as responsible for the behavior of the system as a whole.
I have made exceptions to this rule in the past, but it’s almost always degraded the quality of the discussion. When asked about my opinion on this essay Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability at an AI Safety Social, I said that I thought it was hypocritical since a layoff at Anthropic UK had affected the three staff comprising their entire London interpretability team, which contradicts the top-level takeaway that labs should invest in interpretability efforts since if that was what was happening then you’d ideally be growing headcount on those teams instead of letting people go. But it’s entirely possible Dario had no knowledge of this when writing the article, or that the hiring budget was reallocated to the U.S branch of the interp team, or even that offering relocation to other positions at the company wasn’t practical for boring-and-complex H.R/accounting reasons. It doesn’t seem like the pace of great interpretability research coming out of Anthropic has slowed down, so they’re clearly still invested in it as a company. My hypothesis is that the extremely high financial returns are more of a side effect of operating at that caliber of performance instead of serving as a primary motivator for talent. If they didn’t get rich from Anthropic, they’d get rich at a hedge fund or startup. The stacks of cash are not the issue here. The ambiguous future of the lightcone is.
It’s possible that investors might be more driven by money, but I have less experience talking to them or watching how they work behind the scenes so I can’t claim to know much about what makes them tick.
I think that if you have a knack for ordinary software development, one application of that is to work at a tech company whose product already has or eventually obtains widespread adoption. This provides you with a platform where there is a straightforward path towards helping improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide by a small amount. Claude has around ~20-50 million monthly active users, and for most users it appears to be beneficial overall, so I believe that this criterion is met by Anthropic.
If you capture a small fraction of the value that you generate as a competent member of a reasonably effective team, then that often leads to substantial financial returns, and I think this is fair since the skillset and focus required to successfully plan and execute on such projects is quite rare. The bar for technical hires at a frontier lab is highly competitive, which commands equally competitive compensation in a market economy. You almost certainly had to clear a relatively higher bar (though one with less legible criteria) to be invited as an early investor. Capital appreciation is the standard reward for backing the production of a reliable and valuable service that others depend upon.
If you buy into the opportunity in AGI deployment, even the lower bounds of mundane utility can be one of the most leveraged ways to do good in the world. Given the dangers of ASI development, improvements to the safety and alignment of AGI systems can prevent profound harm, and the importance of this cannot be understated. Even in the counterfactual scenario where Anthropic was never founded, the urgency of such work would still be critical. There is some established precedent for handling a profitable industry with negative externalities (tobacco, petroleum, advertising) and it would be consistent to include the semiconductor industry in this category. I agree that existing frameworks are insufficient for making reasonable decisions about catastrophic risks. These worries have shaped my career working in AI safety, and a majority of the people here share your concerns.
However, I’m uncertain whether vilifying any small group of people would be the right move to achieve the strategic goals of the AI safety community. For example, Igor Babushchkin’s recent transition from xAI to Babuschkin Ventures could have been complicated by an attitude of hostility towards the founders and early investors of AGI companies. Since nuanced communication doesn’t work at scale, adopting this as our public position might inadvertently increase the likelihood of pivotal acts being committed by rogue threat actors, with inevitable media backlash identifying rationalist/EA people as culpable for “publishing radicalizing material”. But taken seriously, that would be a fully general argument against the distribution of online material warning of existential risks from advanced AI, and being dumb enough to be vulnerable to making that sort of error tends to exclude you from being in positions where your failures can cause any real damage, so I think my real contention with such objections is not on strategy, but on principle.
I’d be much more comfortable with accountability falling to the level of the faceless corporate entity rather than on individual members of the organization, because even senior employees with a lot of influence on paper might have limited agency in carrying out the demands of their role, and I think it would be best to follow the convention set by criticism such as Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its Safety Commitments and ryan_greenblatt’s Shortform which doesn’t single out executives or researchers as responsible for the behavior of the system as a whole.
I have made exceptions to this rule in the past, but it’s almost always degraded the quality of the discussion. When asked about my opinion on this essay Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability at an AI Safety Social, I said that I thought it was hypocritical since a layoff at Anthropic UK had affected the three staff comprising their entire London interpretability team, which contradicts the top-level takeaway that labs should invest in interpretability efforts since if that was what was happening then you’d ideally be growing headcount on those teams instead of letting people go. But it’s entirely possible Dario had no knowledge of this when writing the article, or that the hiring budget was reallocated to the U.S branch of the interp team, or even that offering relocation to other positions at the company wasn’t practical for boring-and-complex H.R/accounting reasons. It doesn’t seem like the pace of great interpretability research coming out of Anthropic has slowed down, so they’re clearly still invested in it as a company. My hypothesis is that the extremely high financial returns are more of a side effect of operating at that caliber of performance instead of serving as a primary motivator for talent. If they didn’t get rich from Anthropic, they’d get rich at a hedge fund or startup. The stacks of cash are not the issue here. The ambiguous future of the lightcone is.
It’s possible that investors might be more driven by money, but I have less experience talking to them or watching how they work behind the scenes so I can’t claim to know much about what makes them tick.