[simoncion]

Yeah.

If you have a sizeable bucket of money, it's so, so easy to get folks so distracted by (or invested in) movie plot threats that they totally fail to (or have a "plausible" excuse to fail to) notice the actual, lasting harm that you're doing to society at scales both small and large.

If Anthropic had pushed hard and nonstop since their founding to ensure that all LLM companies in the world were legally bound to stop all LLM development the minute any one of them called for a halt to work, then I'd give their claims about safety some credit. They've been screaming about "safety" and "alignment" for years, but -because LLMs are impossible to secure against code injection- their products are fundamentally unsafe and always have been... I just don't trust their claims about a commitment to actual safety.

My read on their recent calls for a global "stop work" emergency cord is that they're very soon to (if they haven't already) reach a point where they will not be able to produce products that are sufficiently improved over the previous versions to justify the level of investment required for their development.

My prediction is that Anthropic and OpenAI will get serious barriers to entry of new competitors enshrined in Federal law, they will call for a "pause" or a "slowdown" in new research for "safety" reasons, and the US will attempt to engage in economic warfare with any countries that don't agree to force their domestic LLM companies to stop working on those LLMs.