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by CMay 1 day ago
> The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be widely released. Simply because that will affect Anthropic's bottom-line.

If some other competing company had a similar or better product at a cheaper price and had reasonable safety measures that would also hurt them. Yet he's not arguing against that. Your argument is weak.

> Anthropic and all other "model" companies have nothing making them special beyond privileged access to chips

Found the person that believes some other random person can use a computer better than a John Carmack could. People and talent matter. Yes, AI can potentially reduce the gap, but people well grounded in reality with a lot of money are still betting on people for good reasons. If the reality around that changes, the investment behavior will change too.

Many people thought that AI would close the gap between smart people and idiots, but in practice the more you know, the better you are at instructing the AI and the better you can understand what you get back. Then you have to know when something went wrong and have the insight into how to address it. It helps smart people vastly more, but it does help many people learn more. We will see if any of this changes as more people grow up with AI from a young age.

In practice, what Dario is suggesting is a less extreme version of what China is already doing. Yes they release their models open weight, but it's illegal to host them uncensored in China. They banned Huggingface.

2 comments

> If some other competing company had a similar or better product at a cheaper price and had reasonable safety measures that would also hurt them. Yet he's not arguing against that. Your argument is weak.

He isn't arguing against that, because this will be too blunt. Instead, he argues that only good guys should keep inference. Any takers on the question of who he considers to be the good guys?

> Found the person that believes some other random person can use a computer better than a John Carmack could.

Found the person that believes major AI labs have all the knowledge about the AI and there aren't any "Carmacks" outside of these companies. Rich know better how to use money, so let them have it.

> Any takers on the question of who he considers to be the good guys?

Probably people who believe in personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the value of human life at a minimum. China aggressively rejects all of those principles and executes more people than all other countries on Earth combined.

So, maybe not China?

> Found the person that believes major AI labs have all the knowledge about the AI and there aren't any "Carmacks" outside of these companies. Rich know better how to use money, so let them have it.

I never said that, but private smaller AI companies are all over the place. He never argued against that.

Apparently, looking at Iraq and Vietnam, US citizens only believe in "personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the value of human life" when it comes to US citizens, not to humans in general.

Even on HN, I saw a lot, that when people discuss surveillance topics, they argue whether ie NSA can spy on Americans, not on everyone. Mostly, nobody even question the human rights of those inferior humans abroad.

That's a very long wiki page, I must say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

So the question stays open.

Vietnam and Iraq were both unpopular wars in their own ways, so they don't seem like good examples if you're trying to find examples of what US citizens support.

Also, a country surveilling its own citizens has unique and different implications compared to surveilling other countries. Citizens need to be able to influence their own government, but mass control can nullify citizen power entirely which becomes its own problem.

Then, on a US website, you link to another US website which keeps track of various war crimes. Try finding an equivalent website for China in China, or for Iran in Iran. This is part of the asymmetric freedom issue on the internet that many people ignore. There are a lot of lies and propaganda spread within other countries that censor and deny some types of information from even existing, then they use that as a springboard to spread it around the world.

In the US, we can criticize ourselves which is important, since it helps us improve.

> If some other competing company had a similar or better product at a cheaper price and had reasonable safety measures that would also hurt them. Yet he's not arguing against that. Your argument is weak.

Wouldn't it be interesting if the satisfactory "reasonable safety measures" turn out to be expensive + time-consuming + a twisty maze of compliance paperwork as a way to discourage "some other competing company" from even trying?

Regulatory capture 101.

Anthropic and OpenAI's largest vulnerability is that it's much harder to prove something is possible than to replicate it once it's proven. Especially given the effectiveness of "distillation" (highly schadenfreude-y given the utter and complete lack of effort to pay licensing fees for almost any of the content they initially scraped, of course! Not that this is necessarily more schadenfreude-y than the "boy, I opened Pandora's box, I sure hope nobody else peaks in there" existential-risk concerns. Good job catching that in advance, thanks for nothing?).

A lot of safety infrastructure and tools get open sourced so other companies can benefit from it, but there is also a risk if all safety features are open since it can accelerate the cat and mouse game where people work around more clearly defined limits and understand how they are implemented.

Your cynicism will limit your understanding of other perspectives.