I don’t know enough about X.AI, but it seems to me that if they really were that close, they wouldn’t sell a large part of their compute to Anthropic. And Elon Musk has at least said often enough that he thinks superintelligence is very dangerous, so maybe he would cooperate if someone got really serious about pausing.
As for the METR evaluation, I think it is possible that X.AI did participate and chose to leave after the internal eval, but before the results were published, in which case their participation would have been kept confidential.
xAI have been hemorrhaging senior talent (particularly founders in the pretraining area, they still have post-training people). So either they were further behind than that, or Elon Musk is hard to work for, or both.
It’s also notable they’ve been leasing compute to competitors, which is unusual if they have a good use for it themselves
They all are, aren’t they? At this point it feels like they hire someone that can steer the ship into the least headwind, then fire them. It’s a scary race ultimately factoring in the entire economy, wars will be fought with these corporations.. however good-willed employees they may have. The big picture looks quite bleak considering the effort is focused on a competitive race rather, because by now they all know you can’t patch things up or govern anything thats outpacing your safeguard mechanisms.. particularly almost all of them don’t know how they’re systems neural networks communicate. I know this sounds doomey but, I really hope I’m wrong.
I don’t know enough about X.AI, but it seems to me that if they really were that close, they wouldn’t sell a large part of their compute to Anthropic. And Elon Musk has at least said often enough that he thinks superintelligence is very dangerous, so maybe he would cooperate if someone got really serious about pausing.
As for the METR evaluation, I think it is possible that X.AI did participate and chose to leave after the internal eval, but before the results were published, in which case their participation would have been kept confidential.
xAI have been hemorrhaging senior talent (particularly founders in the pretraining area, they still have post-training people). So either they were further behind than that, or Elon Musk is hard to work for, or both.
It’s also notable they’ve been leasing compute to competitors, which is unusual if they have a good use for it themselves
They all are, aren’t they? At this point it feels like they hire someone that can steer the ship into the least headwind, then fire them. It’s a scary race ultimately factoring in the entire economy, wars will be fought with these corporations.. however good-willed employees they may have. The big picture looks quite bleak considering the effort is focused on a competitive race rather, because by now they all know you can’t patch things up or govern anything thats outpacing your safeguard mechanisms.. particularly almost all of them don’t know how they’re systems neural networks communicate. I know this sounds doomey but, I really hope I’m wrong.