[hypfer]

Anthropic always came off to me as what can shorthand be described as an abusive controlling partner + the resulting relationship.

If you start viewing the conversations around it through that lens, a lot of stuff intuitively clicks into place.

Including this apologism for example.

[pibaker]

Seems like the people talking about AI safety and alignment don't want to stop at just harnessing their AIs. They also want to keep themselves safe from competition and make sure only users aligned with their business and political agenda gets to access their products.

The same people are boasting about being the future of work and is schmoozing with politicians to draft regulations, by the way.

[sixtyj]

Why would they want to do that when it’s likely that someone will find out anyway and it could turn into a scandal?

One possibility: they wanted to keep it secret because they’re crooks.

Another possibility: there are so many calls that it costs a lot in operating expenses.

Remember when we mentioned that even just saying “hello” at the start of a chat costs extra money for no reason?

So if I create a mechanism on the client side that every transmission uses 4 bytes instead of 40… it is clever way how to spend less.

Of course, it doesn’t excuse them for not mentioning it anywhere… or for hiding it on page 385 of the terms of service… like when the Vogons told Earthlings that the notice about Transgalactic Highway was in the basement on Alpha Centauri :)

[hypfer]

Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner.

Things do not need to make sense. They often do not. They just appear just enough like they would so that it flies under the radar.

It's all just conway's law. It had to be like this. It cannot be any other way.

[dragonwriter]

> Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner.

Humans are rarely “long-term timeframe rational” (rational choice theory is very much a known-false model of human behavior on both the individual and aggregate level), but there is nothing about abusively exploiting an initially trusting and eventually dependent telationship that it is inconsistent with long-term rationality.

[hypfer]

I can't really parse this comment, but I also have a feeling that nothing is lost in struggling with that.