I don’t know what true feelings live in their hearts, but behaviorally speaking, Anthropic leadership’s behavior is not consistent with what I’d predict from someone who wants to slow down AI. It is consistent with what I’d predict from someone who wants to placate AI safety people while continuing to race ahead.
I liked Nate Soares’ recent tweets about this (1, 2, 3). Excerpt:
Wikipedia spends more effort convincing you to donate $2 than AI companies spend galvanizing the world to stop the race. There’s a real inconsistency between what they say and how they behave. This mealy-mouthed behavior incurs real costs.
Fair. I think I could have phrased it better, but my point is more like Anthropic doesn’t seem to care too much about AI development speeds (or their impact on accelerating it) but insofar as they care, they’d think its better for society to have slightly slower societal AI progress. I think this is also consistent with their views.
I do agree that Anthropic’s accelerating timelines so much (along with some dishonest behavior) was bad and Dario is very overoptimistic about the benefits of AI.
Ok, my last comment was not that relevant then. What I would say instead is: I believe the most important thing to be doing at current margins is trying to pause AI, and I do not expect the biggest Anthropic donors to spend their money on trying to pause AI. If “Anthropic doesn’t seem to care too much about AI development speeds”, then they’ll probably spend their donation money on other things like technical alignment research, right?
Maybe in my original comment I shouldn’t have said they “believe that accelerating AI capabilities is a good idea” because that’s not quite right (it’s more like “believe that working on AI capabilities is okay”) and, more importantly, it’s not the relevant bit of info—the relevant thing is that they’re much more optimistic than I am about their chances of solving AI alignment or otherwise successfully navigating transformative AI without pausing, which I think will cause them to spend money in ways that aren’t very useful according to my beliefs. And not just that we disagree on that particular issue, but that they are not thinking clearly about AI risk, and I expect this will cause them to spend money in highly suboptimal ways even if I can’t predict exactly what they will want to spend money on.
I don’t know what true feelings live in their hearts, but behaviorally speaking, Anthropic leadership’s behavior is not consistent with what I’d predict from someone who wants to slow down AI. It is consistent with what I’d predict from someone who wants to placate AI safety people while continuing to race ahead.
I liked Nate Soares’ recent tweets about this (1, 2, 3). Excerpt:
Fair. I think I could have phrased it better, but my point is more like Anthropic doesn’t seem to care too much about AI development speeds (or their impact on accelerating it) but insofar as they care, they’d think its better for society to have slightly slower societal AI progress. I think this is also consistent with their views.
I do agree that Anthropic’s accelerating timelines so much (along with some dishonest behavior) was bad and Dario is very overoptimistic about the benefits of AI.
Ok, my last comment was not that relevant then. What I would say instead is: I believe the most important thing to be doing at current margins is trying to pause AI, and I do not expect the biggest Anthropic donors to spend their money on trying to pause AI. If “Anthropic doesn’t seem to care too much about AI development speeds”, then they’ll probably spend their donation money on other things like technical alignment research, right?
Maybe in my original comment I shouldn’t have said they “believe that accelerating AI capabilities is a good idea” because that’s not quite right (it’s more like “believe that working on AI capabilities is okay”) and, more importantly, it’s not the relevant bit of info—the relevant thing is that they’re much more optimistic than I am about their chances of solving AI alignment or otherwise successfully navigating transformative AI without pausing, which I think will cause them to spend money in ways that aren’t very useful according to my beliefs. And not just that we disagree on that particular issue, but that they are not thinking clearly about AI risk, and I expect this will cause them to spend money in highly suboptimal ways even if I can’t predict exactly what they will want to spend money on.