[sanderjd]

I mean... I'm not even extraordinarily cynical about this stuff, but to me this seems like a totally normal level of corporate gamesmanship?

Companies look for and seek to maintain competitive moats. This is not particularly clever, it's a core part of corporate strategy.

[nextaccountic]

It's also highly unethical (for some values of ethics)

[tripleee]

of course, but the safety angle was pushed from day one. I more mean the forethought of how it would play out

[reasonableklout]

Ok but Dario has been thinking about AI Safety since 2016 [1], before even GPT-1. I think the simplest explanation is that the Anthropic folks genuinely believe what they say, it just happens to also help their business a lot.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565

[sanderjd]

Yeah I think this is right. The best setup is when a true belief aligns with a competitive moat.

I definitely believe that (to his credit!) Amodei is a true believer in safety. But I also think it was important for many of the deep pockets investors who have been involved in the company since early on to recognize that this would be a potentially defensible moat.

[mkss]

"True believer in safety" but happily quoting arse wipe Vance? Give me a break...

[sanderjd]

What was the quote? For what it's worth, I do really think that Amodei believes in and cares about safety. But that is not the same as believing that he is entirely altruistic or above the influence of politics.

[mlcrypto]

That just shows how wrong he's been because there was nothing unsafe about AI in 2016. And the people theorizing about this stuff in the 20th century? I want to see what crazy code they were writing

[reasonableklout]

Is it not better to anticipate problems for a technology so that we can develop theories and techniques to solve them ahead of time?

For instance, Amodei co-authored RLHF in 2017 [1], 5 years before it went on to be used to turn GPT-3 into ChatGPT.

[1]: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/d...

[sanderjd]

Does this really seem exceedingly clever and hard to foresee to you? To me, it seems like a pretty standard regulatory capture strategy.

This doesn't even mean that they're wrong about the risks or that they're lying. But surely all the investors understood this factor in their moat.