| It's not about proving people are honest. It's about knowing that people either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Not because they want to, but because it's a natural journey given this competitive game of corporations. OpenAI and Sam Altman being dishonest (or not) really has bearing on Anthropic. It's wholly unnecessary to argue about those other parties when discussing Anthropic or companies in general. Put simply, Alice being dishonest doesn't make Bob honest. But interestingly enough, OpenAI at first was also regarded as uncompromising stewards of "AI for everyone". It's in their name! Speaking specifically about Anthropic, being concerned with AI existential risks is incredibly self-serving because guess who owns the very powerful AI that needs to be treated carefully and not allowed into the hands of other countries or competitors? All under the guise of being for the people. Even if a hundred people within the organization are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, the company is not actually bound to that behavior and can renege on it at any point in time—just like OpenAI did. Besides, Anthropic cofounders left OpenAI effectively forever ago. Just after GPT-2, which was pretty useless still. It was a whole different company. And the young are often naive but that naiveté eventually fades. Investors make demands, business realities sink in, and founders compromise. This has happened time and time again. Or did you forget how Google Chrome started? Or how the shading and labeling of ads on Google has evolved over time? Or that "Do no evil" has been dropped? The thing about my argument is that it doesn't require a purposeful nefarious motive. Corporations exist to maximize profits. When they act perfectly according top their stated goals, they make some decisions that are not in the interest of everyone else. It's important to remember that. |
I was mainly responding to this I know what you mean.
The reason I bring up OpenAI is because a lot of the discourse has boiled down to "both sides are the same" which I don't think is fair.