It is not human waves, but they have been on the attack for quite some time now relying on small infantry units while obtaining very little ground. What does that tell you about what's happening to those infantry?
Yeah and Anthropic is a... dividual consisting of founders, staff, and shareholders, and must comply with various governments ultimately deriving their values from billions of people.
I'm curious what the state of alignment research is. My gut says this is basically impossible. People have different moral frameworks. Each individual probably has an inconsistent moral framework. Even granting perfect consistency, applying these typically requires some knowledge of reality. And these LLM / harness combos are turing complete.
So you don't know what it should do, you may not even know what you would do, you don't necessarily know what's happening, and can't predict what will happen. How do you align that?
Seems like these overly sensitive filters are responding to this difficulty.
Nobody at Microsoft knows what a good OS is, or what a good dev toolchain is, or what a good videocall app is, or what a good AR headset is, or...
I'm being harsh. I'm sure that there are plenty of people in the org that have taste. And they have a lot of users. But MS is where products go to die (i.e. enshittify).
Even if it's deterministic that doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary. I can achieve determinism at any temperature by saving the seed. But that wouldn't make rejects feel much better knowing that if a bit was flipped in an arbitrary seed they would be scored differently.
You would get evicted at most. Even if you're in debt, bankruptcy does not come with any criminal liability. You'd have to do something much worse to receive jail time. And I'm not really sure what this has to do with startups, is the claim that the founders are in cahoots with landlords in the Bay Area to hold employees captive?
A sole consumer of labor is a monopsony, not a monopoly (that would be a union). At any rate, the point is that there are many many employment negotiations that no reasonable person would agree to amount to duress. This is a counterexample to the idea that any negotiation of employment involves duress. I don't need to disprove the existence of any coercive employment. But SaaS companies are especially relevant since pg specializes in showing people how to become billionaires through SaaS. If earning a billion dollars implies some measure of coercion we should be able to find that in a SaaS startup.
I do not understand your statement, maybe you can elaborate. If you are saying there should be a public option for healthcare, I happen to agree. Then we can have the standard discussions on how the government ought to raise funds for it. If you are saying that by negotiating terms of employment, any employer is intrinsically engaged in violence, that stance is pretty out there.
I don't think pg would disagree that the politicians that discuss this want to allocate more resources to labor. But what he takes exception with specifically is the rhetoric used to justify this "reallocation." AOC's claim:
> “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” she said. “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”
You can produce a motte-and-bailey-type argument where the "get market power" and "pay people less than their worth" are doing all the heavy lifting in that statement. But I think we can agree that she is very much tying the accrual of wealth to various kinds of villainy. That is what pg is taking on. And that matters because the common person would agree with the statement that you should be rewarded for what you create - if wealth accrual is all theft, that perception would make a much stronger argument for the reallocation of resources.
Of course it's arguable. You make it sound like founders perform some jedi mind-trick to take money from others. Here's what actually happens. Investors put in initial money because it's a win-win (they get an expected return, founders get starting capital). Employees join because it's a win-win (they get a salary, health, equity, other perks; founders get a workforce). Customers pay cash because it's a win-win (they get a product or service they want, the business gets money). At no point is someone being held down and forced to hand money to someone else.
I don't know why you think I'm taking anything literally, cf. my first comment. I understand what a metaphorical arms race is. I don't think that Anthropic can forestall others' AI development by getting there first. It can't be literal destruction. It can't be economic destruction (some actors interested in it aren't motivated by money). What's left? I'm all ears.
As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?
Well it's difficult to argue against something that was never specifically stated. If someone is able to state specifically how this is an arms race in any other way than that it's a race at all then I'm happy to have that conversation.
I can't really say I see a similarity to either the Manhattan Project or the Cold War. I don't see how one could apply either massive retaliation or MAD. These are private companies, they are not vested with the necessary authority to destroy anything. Even if they had it, they couldn't. You can't destroy China, they have 1.4B people, nukes, and a large part of the world's manufacturing. So multiple organizations want to do something first, that could be anything from nukes to railroads to lining up for communion wafers.
It's an interesting assumption. The idea behind this with nukes was that we'd like to nuke Germany before they could nuke us. Even after we defeated Germany, we nuked Japan even though they had no possibility of getting their own nukes.
The nuclear 'race' was based on the premise that the winner could use it to destroy all other racers (a faulty assumption, see the USSR among others). I will charitably assume Anthropic does not intend to literally destroy anyone and merely wants to become an AGI monopoly. But if AGI is so powerful, any monopoly would not be stable since the incentives for entry into the market are massive. Why would China stop developing AGI just because Anthropic has it?
I'm not proposing anything. I don't think it's the government's remit to be honest. But government seizing the means of production is literally the definition of communism.
There is a line between tax and unlawful taking. The constitution forbids taking of property without due process or compensation. No, the government can't just take whatever it likes from anyone and call it a tax.
Taxes generally demand payment in the form of general assets, but taking targets specific identified property. Likewise taxes are raised from a general category whereas taking singles out one or a few properties. Now if it was just the targeting of AI companies you could argue it's a one-time AI tax rather than singling out those companies for taking. But once you state that the tax must be paid by shares (and not just assets equal to 50% of market cap) that looks less like a tax and more like appropriation of equity for public good without compensation.
There are other vulnerabilities too - income taxes are explicitly exempted from apportionment. This "tax" would probably run afoul of apportionment.