So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity.
Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.
The issue is both OpenAI and Anthropic have lied so many times that it’s no longer rational to take anything they say at face value.
Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast
Be specific, what do you consider their lies to be? Also, this is pretty straightforward. You have a decade of extremely stable and predictable performance trajectory. It’s easy to see the writing on the wall. You can feel whatever which way about their motivations and ethics but if you read say Dario’s raw words they are pretty reasonable. We have to have a good regulatory framework and do what we can to prepare ourselves while also not ceding a critical strategic advantage. The west coast is always cult like, that’s not new. And it ignores the very real substance to the discussion.
I think that Anthropic is fully absolutely unethical. And they lied a lot. They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.
If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
It really does not matter how much they believed own doom predictions, because they were actively trying to make them true whether realistic or not.
The point I'm trying to make is Anthropic's marketing about broad security risk related to the capability of its models is a valid concern though their dog and pony show really overdid it, probably to the detriment of us all for many reasons. It is indeed amplifying the abilities of people to find and exploit security issues.
The point of my anecdote is I was able to identify and fix an at least security adjacent bug in a language I could charitably consider myself a novice in. It happened to very unlikely have a security impact, but that was mere chance. LLMs expand the pool of people able to find and exploit security problems and we're all considerably more vulnerable as a result.
The biggest security threat was always someone bored with $20, a lot of attacks could be ignored or at least not prioritized with that threat model. This isn't true any more and our attack surface has gotten a whole lot larger.
Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.