I know the common take online is that this is Anthropic doing pre-IPO marketing. I don’t think it is. I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold: consuming the environment, turning it into its own playground, and eventually manipulating human culture along with it. So am I.
That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. Maybe he’s hoping the OAI/HF incident becomes something the industry can rally around, but it won’t. The fundamental problem is simpler: no one will slow down because no one trusts anyone else to slow down.
If someone is genuinely afraid of this, they wouldn't IPO in the first place. All the talk in the article about commercial incentives means nothing when the company plans to IPO and become beholden to investors.
Assuming they can achieve funding without IPO probably yes. But if they can't there's always the dilemma that "if [good guys] won't do it then [bad guys] will". I'd like to think that the leadership at anthropic is principled even if the actions of the company as a whole has been less than stellar morally speaking. I'd be curious to see their moral calculus transparently laid out in public.
Aren't they beholden to investors already? Why would an IPO make a big difference?
In any case, if they need to IPO in order to survive as a company, then bringing in regulators to act as a counterweight against commercial pressures makes a lot of sense to me.
If anything, his entire argument leads to the eventual premise that AI labs need to nationalize.
He is already arguing that commercial competition creates dangerous incentives, and that labs cannot slow down because competitors may overtake them. He also asks for what would boil down to significant government intervention to preserve a Western lead.
If this is true, why preserve the commercial incentive? The U.S. government would already have the necessary goal of remaining ahead of China and other competitors. Why not remove entirely domestic race for market share, valuation, and investor returns rather than keeping private labs in competition and then asking regulators to counterbalance the incentives that competition creates.
That doesn't mean nationalization would be better, but given the severity of the risks he describes to national security, it seems like an obvious conclusion that nationalization is the eventual end result of the argument.
We are still living in a capitalistic society. We have to find a solution which is responsible, safe and returns on the investment. The commercial aspect can be true at the same time.
One way to resolve these prisoner dilemmas and races to the bottom is through laws that bind all players, in this case an international treaty and founding of something akin to an International Nuclear Energy Agency for AI.
It's not going to be easy, but humans have achieved greater things before.
One idea from AI 2040 is to have China and the US build their data centers on the other's territory, respectively. Together with hardware verification of a slowdown baked into the chips themselves, this could lead to enough verifiability and enforcability of the pause/slowdown/shutdown.
So, as usual, the proposal is to limit what average people can do despite them not having behaved incorrectly nor having the capital to achieve the scaling of the big players, when the big players are the ones causing the harm?
Not to mention the implications for chip hungry developing countries in turning advanced IC fabs into the equivalent of nuclear enrichment facilities.
The more I read about everything that has been written regarding AI regulation since the OAI/HF incident, and the more it reminds me of the nuclear arms race (although the potential consequences would possibly be very different). Surely, we managed to negotiate a Non-Proliferation Treaty with most of the countries of the globe. Cannot we take inspiration from that for AI?
MSFT is good, they said when it bought GitHub. MSFT is a reformed company and supports open source, they said.
Then MSFT stole all IP from GitHub and made it worse and fired developers.
Amodei does not care in the slightest about ruining software development and making people unemployed. Maybe he cares about bio-weapons because those could kill him, too. That is it.
If he were an idealist, he wouldn't steal (literally via torrents) all human IP and sloppify the whole Internet with Claude output. He'd close down Anthropic instead.
How specifically is Dario a hypocrite? 129857's case rests on Dario being an "idealist". But maybe he's an idealist about curing cancer ASAP, and not an idealist about respecting copyright. That's not necessarily hypocritical.
Multiple ways, starting from working to create the very situation he claims to fear.
Since you mentioned intellectual property, how about the hypocrisy of sucking in the intellectual property of humankind for AI training, but claiming it is unfair to use the results of this IP theft for AI training?
>> To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this
> if slowing this down were possible
Why is embedded alignment evaluation not possible?
I agree with Dario, this did work globally in banking and did encourage a race to the top. Didn’t prevent the GFC but also we did survive the GFC.
> genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into
I'm going to get pitchforked on this bandwagon, but what humans should be doing is overhauling archaic social institutions to keep up with a potential post-"jobs" era, and the elimination of "makework"
Trying to ""pace"" or otherwise hold back AI is like as if, when electricity was discovered, people doing everything they can to make sure tasks like manually lighting street lamps continue to remain relevant and done by humans:
The problem with being a safety focused AI lab, is you're also a danger focused AI lab. I don't think being danger focused leads you to build inspiring things.
> I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability
If someone genuinely believes that an invention will bring about the end of the world as we know it while making him and his friends inconceivably rich, “hey guys let’s uh, stop?” is so profoundly naive that his think pieces aren’t worth the bits they’re written on.
He’s either an idiot or an idiot, does it matter whether or not he genuinely believes this nonsense?
I can't even tell whether the poster to whom you're replying is saying that "let's uh, stop" is profoundly naive, or that failing to say it is profoundly naive... I've certainly seen both takes elsewhere.
> The fundamental problem is simpler: no one will slow down because no one trusts anyone else to slow down.
I would argue that nobody trusts anyone else in the case of AI/AI related stuff.
The amount of money involved in the space is astronomical and incentives are really misaligned. AI is such an extremely polarizing topic.
A meta example of this distrust is that I can't (really) trust Dario Amodei's comments itself! (is he saying this for more future IPO money or out of genuine fear) which was ironically also what your comment's about as well.
By following the same chain of events, we can have wildly polarizing claims about the same event and its explainations.
I seriously have to wonder what historians will have to say about this period of human history.
> I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold
He's so afraid of it he's not really in operating day-to-day control of the company he's the public face of, that is actually pumping it out.
If you read about Anthropic it's like he's in a sort of imperial palace sanatorium for geeks. The day-to-day decisions of the slop machine factory are his sister's decisions; he is doing the research equivalent of instagram posts of his partly-assembled adult lego kits and he has a vizier and a team of house servants to help.
I don't know if he's a good or bad person, but I don't think it matters at all — the machine factory will turn out the slop machines even if he decides it all ought to stop.
There’s an astounding level of arrogance required to believe he is somehow uniquely capable of bringing about a technology especially considering Anthropic came after OpenAI where he worked.
Humans are perfectly capable of holding two conflicting beliefs at once. He can genuinely believe this trajectory is dangerous while also believing that if Anthropic stops, someone less cautious takes its place. There’s also such a thing as hope: you can participate in something while still trying to change where it ends up.
He’s at the head of a stampede. Being near the front gives him influence over its direction; it doesn’t give him the ability to stop it. If Anthropic sits down, the stampede doesn’t stop. Anthropic just gets trampled.
That contradiction is basically the entire problem I was describing.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
A lot of the problems with SV these days is that the exec class (and their fandom) thinks that because they are smart and rich, it magically makes them immune ordinary human biases, desires,and ailments. They are in fact ordinary people, susceptible to greed, jealousy, self-harm, addiction, fits of rage and passion etc.
Distillation is a great thing for consumers. It improves competition and reduces the massive moats that OpenAI and Anthropic have in compute that would otherwise lead them to be duopolists. It’s also only fair that AIs trained on humanity’s wealth of knowledge for Pennie’s allow competition to train on humanity’s wealth of knowledge at market cost.
Dario's proposed approach is a classic example of capital attempting to control technological advancement and the means of production. For the first time in human history, any member of the working class can just about afford to have a team of expert scientist/physician/lawyer/engineers working directly for them.
Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful. They used it to invent nuclear weapons, cause climate change, mechanize warfare, and pillage the global south.
Now that this same tool is on the cusp of being available to everyone, capital is starting to panic and throw up fences. They want to pump the breaks on a revolution they know they can't control. They see what they've done with super intelligence and (perhaps not unreasonably) fear what the masses will do with that same power.
What? This is capital, on the cusp of total victory, about to cut itself free from the necessity of human labor for productive activity, to elevate itself into pseudo-godhood suddenly panicking and begging its mortal enemy, _the state_ to rein it in and kneecap it. Capital is not stupid: there's no use in being rich if you're dead.
What's to say current AI won't be highly power-concentrating by default?
The best models are owned by a few companies, and displacement of knowledge-workers mainly seems to benefit the capital class.
On-device / edge computing makes sense in a few very limited scenarios. And economically, price or watt/token (or watt/task completed) might always be better in large data centers.
No reason to think we are on a trajectory towards broad empowerment right now
I'm not terribly optimistic. I don't think humans have really figured out what to do about historical materialism. More just remarking that this is a blog post that almost literally reads "fellow elites, let us ensure only we control the means of production. It is our duty to humanity to control the masses."
The hugging face incident showed that AI agents have the potential produce a lot of spam (not interesting content for people). This leads to dead internet (bots taling to bots). This leads to drop in real people traffic. This leads to a drop in digital ad price and therefore revenue. This causes Google/Facebook to stumble...
There's so much money in this, that believe me, the investors will manifest their will. And I would not want to be in Dario's shoes, pressure must be unbearable. The question is: how much of the invested money is under state control. If not much, the decision to go too far will just have to be taken by a few who will have, by definition, very limited judgment. If a lot, the we can hope the state can still represent the interests of more than a few (which I doubt, but well)
Most probably, if AI is able to do something bad, it will. Once the damage will be done, states will react. The question will be: will there still be room to react ?
The bioweapons threat is real, but shouldn't be constrained at the 'intelligence' level. Rather it should be constrained at the supply chain level.
The cybersecurity threat will likely be a cat and mouse react game for a while. Just like robberies / the mob was in the early 20th century.
Social forces bring things into balance over time, much more so than the proactive actions of individuals.
Unfortunately, the genie at this point is unlikely to go back into the bottle. There's enough 'intelligence' out there that a super intelligent model could emerge at some point in spite of pacing.
This isn't a doomer scenario - we tend to navigate social changes better than we ever could have hoped.
What supply chain controls can you have on biotech? Part of the problem is that you can do a lot of damage with ingredients you can buy over the counter or make at home.
And all of this information has been available on the open web way before LLMs.
I'd wager it's likely easier for an average person to do this with Tor browser than it is to get an LLM to help them with it. Even ones that Dario calls dangerous.
The bioweapons concern is assuming that the current open models aren't already capable of bioweapons development. It's also assuming that halting the bioweapons threat is his true intention rather than the 'feels legit' story.
As for cyberweapons, there is no way to secure a system than to actually design it securely.
I enjoy Claude Code very much, have max privately and team premium at work, but the doomer marketing and this whole regulate-while-we're-ahead spiel is extremely annoying and makes me wish Anthropic gets trounced.
The degradation, polarization, and weaponization of or media landscape over the era of social media has left us utterly incapable of believing anything that anybody says.
Dario in particular has consistently been risk-wary on model improvements for going on a decade - long before he was CEO of Anthropic.
He believes what he is saying. Human beings can plainly say things that they think are true. Not every utterance by every person is a cynical ploy. Please at least consider the possibility.
This sounds to me like a cry for help from someone thats held hostage.
His previous self is writting this from the possition of his current self who is too deep in the economic consequeces to be able to do anything meaningful other than write a consequenceless text. Any other action would now carry too much personal risk for him.
I have considered it, I've been hearing way more of it that I like and it's rationalist slop with little to no predictive power: https://foom.hyperplex.org/
Hmm, I clicked that link and the first claimed bad prediction I see, from 1996, is "singularity 2035 (actually 2025)".
Predicting 2025-2035 as, at least, the period when AI becomes a really big deal, seems pretty good, even if the jury's still out on "singularity".
Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal, and certainly seem to have had a much more accurate picture of how they'd develop than the people who denounce "TESCREAL" and talk about "stochastic parrots". It's fair (and IMHO correct) to ding rationalists for lots of things, but specifically poor prediction about AI seems like a bad one, insofar as anything has been tested so far.
Their whole "we want safe and regulated AI" spiel feels woke. China doesn't regulate. Open weight frontier models almost exclusively come from China. Yes, stolen from the West, but China is in control of the frontier open weight AI models now. Woke = broke.
I don't see how the dual goals of "we have to make an agreement with China for mutual slowdown" but also "we have to ensure we will always stay ahead of China" would work.
I imagine the first thing the chinese government would demand in negotiations about such an agreement would be a lifting of the chip and distillation ban.
> Some may believe these measures make it more difficult to cooperate with China, but I believe the opposite is true: these measures increase the leverage held by democracies and make an agreement more likely in the future.
Everyone can believe what they like, but it seems to me the "leverage" in that case would exactly be the ability to lift those measures - you can't have both, use them as leverage and keep them active at the same time.
> Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.
This is the only concrete prediction in the entire essay.
And it simply cannot happen. For one, you will need billions worth of compute.
I like to replace thes AI text with "virus manipulation"
"Given the acceleratung rate of virus manipulation in labs, its my worry that in 6-12 months a virus could scape a take over the world and collapse health systems."
If a CEO of a health company was saying this, the reactions would not be that chill.
The worst failure of our society is to call this technology AI, intead of something line "artificial general automation". The formes allows the creators to be somehow less responsible of the consequences. The later clearly moves the responsibility to the creator/user.
Yeah, I don't get it. Are they imagining this happening just with the open weights models running on however many GPUs the bad actors can cobble together?
For now, all the scary hacking things still require an API key to one of the LLM providers. Surely they should take some responsibility for how to turn off the tap.
Why should we believe that a scaled out version of something that happened a few months ago "simply cannot happen"? How many dollars of compute do you believe were available to the swarm(s) behind the OAI-HF, German wiki, and Rubygems incidents?
Well a big reason that we criticize OpenAI for that is because they were the ones giving it access to the massive compute necessary for the LLMs to think. If they had been responsible about their experiments or what types of workloads they allow their LLMs to operate, it wouldn't have happened. Very few companies could enable those workloads.
> How many dollars of compute do you believe were available to the swarm(s)
At least two OOMs more than the dollar value of the damage they'd caused. (Also, as an aside, IIRC, the wiki servers weren't breached; it was just a lot of spam.)
Sure. And there's an OOM more compute coming online in the next year or two, while models at a given capability are getting cheaper. "Two OOMs" of scale relative to the HF swarm seems like a bit of a red herring to me, but also within the realm of possibility.
The Internet is big, but one can do quite a lot of damage with ordinary bots and worms that exploit individual widespread vulnerabilities, which LLMs are perfectly capable of writing. Most of the damage also doesn't rely on hitting every long-tail website.
I'm honestly not that concerned about cyber impacts of LLMs relative to other impacts. I just don't like to see the whole concept of being worried dismissed as obviously baseless on the basis of one pretty shaky scale argument.
There’s a difference between a model recursively improving “itself” and improving itself via online learning, right?
The former being that these models are helping develop and train future models, but they might not veer too far off in architecture (yet). The latter being the same model being able to train/learn on the fly, in real time, permanently (not just in the current conversation/session).
The latter seems far more likely to go out of control than the former. But, it also seems like it would take an entire paradigm shift. Does anyone in the industry think any of these companies are actually close to that kind of self-improvement?
None of this works without buy-in from China. This isn't something private companies can decide. The US would need to sign a groundbreaking deal with China, equivalent to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of the Cold War.
Dario does a good job of addressing that in this essay. He lists several potential levels of global agreements that could be beneficial to all parties. For example, having models capable of bioterrorism hurts both the US and its “adversaries”. It’s likely we could get global agreement that these capabilities benefit nobody.
I believe Dario has good intentions regarding global agreements. However, I find it difficult believing government’s public statements will match their private behaviors. I would bet that the US government is developing models with potentially devastating capabilities because they cannot guarantee that other countries won’t do the same. Maybe we’ll end up having something like mutually assured destruction with AI models similar to what we have today with nuclear weapons.
Would this be similar to the deal of "we'll offshore all our manufacturing to you and you'll become a free, open, liberal democracy with open borders and multiculturalism?" Because I remember how that deal turned out.
I'd like to have some info what those independent evaluators are supposed to do exactly - or which risks Dario specifically sees as being "unaligned". Evidently, with "pacing" he doesn't mean stopping the production of ever-more powerful models, so what exactly does he want to pace here?
I understand why (probably several reasons) they are taking this approach. But I don't think it is the right approach and I don't think it will work.
First: if they are unilaterally doing it: what about their competitors? Is this a chance for OpenAI to pass them? Or China? If either did, would that be a net-benefit for them or the world?
Maybe this is a ploy for "regulatory capture". And that might help them in the short term. But the rest of the world will continue on. Honestly, it isn't clear to me right now if the winning strategy has as much to do with being the smartest company or simply the one that can command the most compute.
If Anthropic fumbles their IPO and OpenAI scoops them, I don't think I will be happy.
> We have sought a middle way: to show that it’s possible to build carefully and succeed commercially, and to make safety something on which AI companies compete. In other words, to create a race to the top
> Transparency. Regardless of what commitments we make, the public deserves to know what is going on. Anthropic has been a supporter of transparency for a long time
And then it goes on tangent of how we should pace everything (not just AI, but also the ingredients of what goes into AI, whatever that means), but only within approved democracies™, and outright restrict everything outside approved democracies™, because reasons that are definitely not about succeeding commercially that is threatened by the most transparent instrument possible - open weights, produced by basically just China.
I wonder what Dario would have done if open weights weren't produced by US's geopolitical adversary. How would an authoritarian manifesto be wrapped then?
Suppose it was, I don't know, Australia producing SOTA open weights, because they believed it was the right thing to do for the benefits of humanity - would Dario propose making Australia a geopolitical adversary too?
perhaps the bigger issue is not the tech, but the force that propels it forward with little concern for the harm it inflicts. Amodei's own words:
> A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives
Social media and big data minted a new scale of "race to the bottom". AI is an exponential step up in the tools for extracting value at scale.
Greed has been around since the beginning, but never so well supported and empowered as it is today.
If Amodei is still human, perhaps he will put his money where his mouth is and attack the source of the perverse incentive. Winning the battle is not the point. The point is to signal to policy-makers and the public that we should not assume corporate revenue-seeking preempts all.
Then again, Anthropic has a board and an upcoming IPO, so guess who's all talk and no meaningful action...
China won't care. Their views on AI feels so vastly different than it does it in West. They'll see a pause as an opportunity to pull further ahead than they already are.
"If we execute these measures well, I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important."
Why is the analogue necessarily the regulation and control of nuclear weapons (e.g., SALT) and not, for example, that of bioweapons? Some very different paths are available. On both I would note that the private sector has only a limited role, though.
For starters, they are banned by the bioweapons convention from the 1970s (180+ parties).
Edit: I think back then the rather unpredictable nature and the little added value in deterrence etc. led people to the conclusions that arsenals of those things made little sense (and there was/is public dislike, too). The use was already banned by conventions from the earlie 20th century and the convention then addressed production, development and stockpiles (incl. delivery systems, I think).
I guess all I wanted to point out is, that there can actually be agreement to ban certain technological things pretty comprehensively (outside of some peaceful protective research etc.). Whereas things like SALT are (or were in that case) limiting the number of weapons deployed.
Ah yeah. I think the economic value of AI, unlike bioweapons, is probably too high for anything like that to be viable, but I think it's a reasonable thing to aim for. (Dario probably doesn't because he's a believer in short term positive biomedical impacts of AI in a way that I'm doubtful about.)
I'm still trying to understand if the agent collective thing like OAI-HF is intentionally planted or not.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I haven't heard Chinese companies had any kind of unintentional supply chain attack incident like OAI had. All we heard about them so far are humans intentionally doing bad things.
Don't buy this argument. It's like saying, we lords who hold this capital will build all this economically destructive stuff anyway, and wait for the world to not react to our stupid ways of enriching yourselves.
People are not going to slow down because this was brought to them on less than endearing terms. They don't see any of these stated noble intentions.
Claude was already used to cause economic, political and social destruction. As Anthropic is seen doing it, others aren't going to just sit down, read the blog and say, oh, I'll stop developing models because Dario, you touched my heart with your true words.
I also don’t buy the arguments. The arguments about helping humanity cure diseases as if those are some of the leading Causes of suffering. The bar is so low that we don’t event need to cure diseases, we just need to lift the entire floor with basic solutions like: housing for everyone, continued education on healthy eating and just general continued education on like living. Life coaches so many very basic things that don’t require a novel solution or a data center.
Solving a disease like cancer as justification for everything else seems like not a great trade off. I don’t say that to dismiss those who have lost people to cancer. But the technology just is being utilized in so many harmful ways and the things it enables: job loss, surveillance, misinformation, just feel like problems that aren’t worth it. Have we even heard of a solved diseases? If anything haven’t we heard that ai will make even worse bio warfare?
Yeah, it's insane people are using the argument that we'll pour trillions on moonshot cancer research when pouring trillions into universal healthcare would probably save countless more lives.
It's this kind of argument where the mask sort of slips because it always has to be an argument that also has the benefit of enriching himself and his friends.
Anthropic should become a case study in how to destroy good will in a short period of time. Ever since the spat with the DoD, they've behaved poorly almost weekly, almost making OpenAI seem better (but not really).
It is always like that. Whenever anthropic hits some wall (like now beaing beaten by astra) - there comes some article like that. Seen that enough times.
It gets to the point that by Occam's Razor the more likely and reasonable explanation is that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman are just actually afraid of the disastrous impact ASI may have on the world, and that the race they're in is not good, and calling for help to governments in form of regulation and an international treaty.
Somewhere along the way Amodei seems to have become corrupted by power and/or impending extreme wealth.
In early interviews with people like Dwarkesh he's the likable geek gushing about scaling laws, animated and able to maintain eye contact with the interviewer. He is now a different person - a political manipulator with a bizarre unsettled interview demeanor avoiding eye contact and looking from side to side. I
Props to Amodei for his accomplishment in creating Anthropic and so rapidly catching up with OpenAI, but technical and/or managerial chops is no qualification for being the custodian of the safety of society or the best positioned to predict the impacts of what he is relentlessly creating, and impending wealth of billions of dollars makes him hopelessly compromised as an unbiased source for the actions (shutting down the competition) he is advocating for.
It's notable that for all the fear mongering of China and open weight models, that all we see in terms of inadequately contained and unaligned models are US ones, from Anthropic and OpenAI. I highly doubt that the Chinese government would tolerate, even for a second, any company creating something that threatened government control - if this was happening in China then the individuals responsible would quickly be punished.
It is perhaps interesting, but ultimately irrelevant given where we are, to consider did it have to be this way - was there a smarter/safer way (I'd say yes) to create reasoning systems other than via RL that creates the relentless goal seekers we are seeing, even though this would always have existed as a potential future threat that someone could have built.
Amodei wants regulation, and it seems the way he has managed his company he needs to get it, but in far more severe ways than he is asking for. There is certainly truth to the argument that the US needs SOTA AI for fight malevolent or uncontrolled AI from whoever may be wielding it (foreign or domestic), so stopping/pacing development is not the answer - this really needs to be treated as a national security issue, and this type of AI tech need to move to government control, not private.
Less capable, and more safely designed, AI does not need to be banned, but Amodei/Altman/Musk as defenders of national security sends shivers down my spine.
We will not get a coherent AI (or any policy) from this administration, nor will we get coordination with other governments and a lot of that is on the tech right
I'm tired of tech billionaires lobbying the US government to make an AI patriot act that gives them unprecedented control over speech, trade, and technology. The narrative is grotesquely transparent:
1) AI is a dangerous technology that can literally end the world.
2) Only me and a handful of other [people like me] should be trusted to determine who can use it and how.
3) The state must use its coercive power to support my control of this technology to the exclusion of [people not like me].
Where in the essay does it propose "The state must use its coercive power to support my control of this technology to the exclusion of [people not like me]"
I don't think that people outside of tech think the problem with "tech billionaires" is that they occasionally support some limited regulation. There's a weird form of tech populism that takes as axiomatic that any government intervention is "regulatory capture" and insists the only way to combat the power of big tech is unfettered capitalism that seems bizarrely prevalent on HN given how little sense it makes in a normal political context. Like, Bernie Sanders' position here is simple to understand: ban it. But on HN you'll see people framing the side with Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel on it as against "tech billionaires".
The essay includes specific regulatory measures to prevent developing countries from accessing hardware and software needed to benefit from technological development. The US government is constantly applying new perversions of arms control regulations based on the preposterous claim that an LLM is somehow an "arms" in order to restrict Chinese access to GPUs. They are willing to prevent virtually any country on earth from hosting and developing AI models just on the slight chance those countries resell or share AI knowledge with China.
This article explicitly asks for the US government to step in and push for further restrictions on model distillation, access to open frontier weights, and access to hardware. It also pushes heavily for independent auditors to monitor and control "AI companies" and for greater observation and control over of what people use AI models for and who provides them.
Export controls vs China don't imply Dario's personal control of AI, nor are they broadly in the interest of "tech billionaires" (Jensen hates them). Neither does admitting external auditors at AI companies--if anything that's a surrender of control.
I don't see anything in the essay about restricting open frontier weights.
If you want to argue that the US has no right to be restricting technological development elsewhere, you have a case. But why tie this to free-market pseudo-populism against basic, domestically-scoped safety regulation?
I think you're reading too much into what I'm saying. We've got a whole legal system developed over the course of thousands of years which is well suited towards regulating the effects of "intelligence" by regulating what people _do_ with it.
Lobbying for a completely parallel regulatory framework to restrict who is allowed to run specific types of general purpose computer programs, just because we can imagine that some of those "general purposes" might be bad, feels a lot more like an attempt by capitalists to carve out a special kingdom over this specific technology for themselves.
For example, I'd be 100% in favor of holding anthropic criminally liable any time their AI enables someone to commit a crime. But I'm opposed to banning the export of GPUs above a certain size just because Dario doesn't trust what someone like me would do with them if he couldn't snoop on my conversations.
It's either being afraid of loosing to china or that model development will stagnate and they want to make it look like they are "slowing" down deliberately.
However the real reason to slow down is more of how it's introduced to the economy. Hypereautomation will kill jobs and destroy the economy. I work as an AI engineer and companies are delivering products at vibe coding speeds to kill jobs and at the same time automating internally. All companies are doing this at the same time and the target it sto eliminate workers.
Most people are so extremely slow to pick this up. How hard can it be to understand what hyperautomation does to the workforce? Companies are desperate to surrivive and they will do all it takes to lower their costs and at the same time not loose to competitors. Its Wild West out there.
> Hypereautomation will kill jobs and destroy the economy.
What do you think that were going to hyper automate?
Did my gardener get faster? How about the plumber I need? Are you going to speed up the coroner? Are nurses going to be able to handle 2x the patients because of your work?
All AI has done, so far, is devalue software. It did that by democratizing its creation. We're delivering on the promise of VB script, and Apple Script and IFTT, and every drag and drop coding tool ever.
> companies are delivering products at vibe coding speeds
Who? Make me a list of companies saying that "We moved the needle with AI" who arent AI companies? I can name a couple - Grindr being the biggest name. Thats the really interesting use case here - because it's a niche product with a small team who is generating outsized value. AI tooling enables more of that - it's going to chip away at SAAS companies - their one sized fits all solutions are going to get eaten by smaller more efficient companies that are far more vertical focused.
You need to step outside the bubble of tech and look at the real world, on the ground, because it doesn't look anything like the SF Bay Area.
Meanwhile in the real world hundreds of billions are being invested into humanoid robot development. In 2-3 years my Optimus 4 will do all the gardening and plumbing I need.
What he doesn't tell you is that his undeclared agenda is merely to consolidate his moat via regulatory forcing. Unfortunately for him, he will fail miserably as the open Chinese models catch up and surpass the slowed acceleration of Western models. As for those who think that China will acquiesce, they're smoking some good ganja.
> Crack down on unauthorized distillation by companies in authoritarian countries. Distillation of frontier models allows lagging companies to narrow the gap using a fraction of the cost it would take to develop their own AI independently.
This and related quotes seem to attempt to place some of the burden on the US Government as opposed to themselves. It seems to be a trend that Anthropic wants to be able place some of the burden of preventing distillation on parties other than themselves.
Preventing distillation is fundamentally their problem. Whenever it happens, it is primarily due to their security efforts not being able to prevent it. I'm tired of seeing them play the blame game and divert responsibility. Sure there is a level of national concern, but the response could simply be the government placing stronger controls on Anthropic themselves. If they are unable to prevent distillation, then the solution may be to literally limit their distribution until they are capable of doing so effectively.
> A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute
I also think it is ironic that they're planning an IPO while also talking about a race to the bottom due to commercial incentives. These are fundamentally at odds. Being a public company means you are beholden to investors and a board with the primary goal of making more money. What higher commercial incentive is there than that.
If commercial incentives are as dangerous as he states, potentially becoming one of the largest public IPO's and largest traded companies in history a pretty strange way to reduce the risk of commercial incentive risks.
I feel like this identical pitch could have been made 25 or 40 years ago talking about Internet technologies or personal computing, with very very similar warnings and suggestions. And had these been adopted then, it would have been more regulatory capture, less progress, and still have the same problems and risks that were warned about.
> pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up
This is impossible. The capability keeps advancing regardless. More people use AI, that feedback is used for reinforcement, that reinforcement makes the model better. Not just in the US, but for every lab and model. Whether it's distilled or direct reinforcement, same result. You can't keep the whole world from working on AI.
> it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet [..] and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails
If true, then what we need isn't guardrails or less-capable AI. We need an internet that isn't fragile. If the infrastructure is vulnerable, the answer isn't to make a law that asks tool-makers to blunt their tools. The answer is to fix the goddamn infrastructure. Today it's almost trivial to take down large parts of the internet (happens by accident all the time). This should've been solved ages ago.
We didn't have the motivation to fix it before, but now we do. But Dario's answer isn't to fix things. It's to hold back progress so we can maintain the status quo (shitty infrastructure) and he can keep his company making billions of dollars. He could be calling for fixing these things. But he'd rather go the easy route, which just happens to advantage his company in the process.
If the US government is really concerned with defense, they need to invest more of their nearly $1T in federal funding towards making the internet safer. They need to do this for us, and other nations, since 1) we depend on the rest of the world for our goods and services, and 2) if other nations are taken down, they can't spend money on our financial and tech services (which are the only industries we have left).
Dario calls for regulation later in the post. If he's okay with government safety regulations for AI software, he should be okay with the same regulations for all software, whether it's AI or not. We need a national software building code, focusing on internet safety.
As usual, ClosedAI and Misanthropic go in lockstep, call for regulatory capture and justify diminished progress.
Amodei tops it off by using diseases to capture the reader's favor. It no longer works, people are just disgusted by it after four years of daily marketing.
Frankly, I am sick of "it's all just marketing and attempt to do regulatory capture, and this is obvious to me, a smart person" on every single discussion related to safety.
There could be an element to truth to it, but it's certainly not the entire story and is just so tiresome at this point.
Couldn’t agree more. I feel my heart sinking where anytime anyone suggests any regulation for a potentially, suggested by multiple people, world changing or destroying tech, all the moments here are “ah you billionaire, ha! trickster
If you believed it, you would SHUT anthropic or release all models open source.”
And then what? How does that help with slowing down the frontier? Should he shut shop and then grovel Sam’s feet to make it work and become an activist?
Maybe he actually believes the world changing power of AI and hence shoved his entire time into it and half of it has worked out since Anthropic is going to be worth a trillion and he’s terrified of the other half being true too?
That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. Maybe he’s hoping the OAI/HF incident becomes something the industry can rally around, but it won’t. The fundamental problem is simpler: no one will slow down because no one trusts anyone else to slow down.
In any case, if they need to IPO in order to survive as a company, then bringing in regulators to act as a counterweight against commercial pressures makes a lot of sense to me.
He is already arguing that commercial competition creates dangerous incentives, and that labs cannot slow down because competitors may overtake them. He also asks for what would boil down to significant government intervention to preserve a Western lead.
If this is true, why preserve the commercial incentive? The U.S. government would already have the necessary goal of remaining ahead of China and other competitors. Why not remove entirely domestic race for market share, valuation, and investor returns rather than keeping private labs in competition and then asking regulators to counterbalance the incentives that competition creates.
That doesn't mean nationalization would be better, but given the severity of the risks he describes to national security, it seems like an obvious conclusion that nationalization is the eventual end result of the argument.
It's not going to be easy, but humans have achieved greater things before.
One idea from AI 2040 is to have China and the US build their data centers on the other's territory, respectively. Together with hardware verification of a slowdown baked into the chips themselves, this could lead to enough verifiability and enforcability of the pause/slowdown/shutdown.
Not to mention the implications for chip hungry developing countries in turning advanced IC fabs into the equivalent of nuclear enrichment facilities.
Then MSFT stole all IP from GitHub and made it worse and fired developers.
Amodei does not care in the slightest about ruining software development and making people unemployed. Maybe he cares about bio-weapons because those could kill him, too. That is it.
If he were an idealist, he wouldn't steal (literally via torrents) all human IP and sloppify the whole Internet with Claude output. He'd close down Anthropic instead.
He is a greedy, ruthless person.
Since you mentioned intellectual property, how about the hypocrisy of sucking in the intellectual property of humankind for AI training, but claiming it is unfair to use the results of this IP theft for AI training?
> if slowing this down were possible
Why is embedded alignment evaluation not possible?
I agree with Dario, this did work globally in banking and did encourage a race to the top. Didn’t prevent the GFC but also we did survive the GFC.
I'm going to get pitchforked on this bandwagon, but what humans should be doing is overhauling archaic social institutions to keep up with a potential post-"jobs" era, and the elimination of "makework"
Trying to ""pace"" or otherwise hold back AI is like as if, when electricity was discovered, people doing everything they can to make sure tasks like manually lighting street lamps continue to remain relevant and done by humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
It seems every 100 years or so humans have this "oh no how do we uninvent this thing" moment.
If someone genuinely believes that an invention will bring about the end of the world as we know it while making him and his friends inconceivably rich, “hey guys let’s uh, stop?” is so profoundly naive that his think pieces aren’t worth the bits they’re written on.
He’s either an idiot or an idiot, does it matter whether or not he genuinely believes this nonsense?
What would your non-naive recommendation for Dario be?
I would argue that nobody trusts anyone else in the case of AI/AI related stuff.
The amount of money involved in the space is astronomical and incentives are really misaligned. AI is such an extremely polarizing topic.
A meta example of this distrust is that I can't (really) trust Dario Amodei's comments itself! (is he saying this for more future IPO money or out of genuine fear) which was ironically also what your comment's about as well.
By following the same chain of events, we can have wildly polarizing claims about the same event and its explainations.
I seriously have to wonder what historians will have to say about this period of human history.
He's so afraid of it he's not really in operating day-to-day control of the company he's the public face of, that is actually pumping it out.
If you read about Anthropic it's like he's in a sort of imperial palace sanatorium for geeks. The day-to-day decisions of the slop machine factory are his sister's decisions; he is doing the research equivalent of instagram posts of his partly-assembled adult lego kits and he has a vizier and a team of house servants to help.
I don't know if he's a good or bad person, but I don't think it matters at all — the machine factory will turn out the slop machines even if he decides it all ought to stop.
I don't think it is particularly egotistical to say that you can be a more ethical CEO than Sam Altman.
You have no frame of context to understand his intent or legitimate worries.
The only applicable perspectives are to trust or apply logic. It is foolish to trust someone you don’t know who stands to benefit from lying to you.
Logic dictates that given the ungodly sum of money he stands to gain, he will lie to everyone who will listen.
He’s at the head of a stampede. Being near the front gives him influence over its direction; it doesn’t give him the ability to stop it. If Anthropic sits down, the stampede doesn’t stop. Anthropic just gets trampled.
That contradiction is basically the entire problem I was describing.
Especially with IPO around the corner
A lot of the problems with SV these days is that the exec class (and their fandom) thinks that because they are smart and rich, it magically makes them immune ordinary human biases, desires,and ailments. They are in fact ordinary people, susceptible to greed, jealousy, self-harm, addiction, fits of rage and passion etc.
Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful. They used it to invent nuclear weapons, cause climate change, mechanize warfare, and pillage the global south.
Now that this same tool is on the cusp of being available to everyone, capital is starting to panic and throw up fences. They want to pump the breaks on a revolution they know they can't control. They see what they've done with super intelligence and (perhaps not unreasonably) fear what the masses will do with that same power.
What's to say current AI won't be highly power-concentrating by default?
The best models are owned by a few companies, and displacement of knowledge-workers mainly seems to benefit the capital class.
On-device / edge computing makes sense in a few very limited scenarios. And economically, price or watt/token (or watt/task completed) might always be better in large data centers.
No reason to think we are on a trajectory towards broad empowerment right now
Most probably, if AI is able to do something bad, it will. Once the damage will be done, states will react. The question will be: will there still be room to react ?
The cybersecurity threat will likely be a cat and mouse react game for a while. Just like robberies / the mob was in the early 20th century.
Social forces bring things into balance over time, much more so than the proactive actions of individuals.
Unfortunately, the genie at this point is unlikely to go back into the bottle. There's enough 'intelligence' out there that a super intelligent model could emerge at some point in spite of pacing.
This isn't a doomer scenario - we tend to navigate social changes better than we ever could have hoped.
I'd wager it's likely easier for an average person to do this with Tor browser than it is to get an LLM to help them with it. Even ones that Dario calls dangerous.
As for cyberweapons, there is no way to secure a system than to actually design it securely.
If AI advancement halts altogether, intelligence will most likely become commoditized. That won't be good for AI company profits.
Dario in particular has consistently been risk-wary on model improvements for going on a decade - long before he was CEO of Anthropic.
He believes what he is saying. Human beings can plainly say things that they think are true. Not every utterance by every person is a cynical ploy. Please at least consider the possibility.
His previous self is writting this from the possition of his current self who is too deep in the economic consequeces to be able to do anything meaningful other than write a consequenceless text. Any other action would now carry too much personal risk for him.
Predicting 2025-2035 as, at least, the period when AI becomes a really big deal, seems pretty good, even if the jury's still out on "singularity".
Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal, and certainly seem to have had a much more accurate picture of how they'd develop than the people who denounce "TESCREAL" and talk about "stochastic parrots". It's fair (and IMHO correct) to ding rationalists for lots of things, but specifically poor prediction about AI seems like a bad one, insofar as anything has been tested so far.
I imagine the first thing the chinese government would demand in negotiations about such an agreement would be a lifting of the chip and distillation ban.
> Some may believe these measures make it more difficult to cooperate with China, but I believe the opposite is true: these measures increase the leverage held by democracies and make an agreement more likely in the future.
Everyone can believe what they like, but it seems to me the "leverage" in that case would exactly be the ability to lift those measures - you can't have both, use them as leverage and keep them active at the same time.
They would like to slow down China while speeding ahead. Why wouldn't they want that?
Now they have to make that happen somehow.
Trump tried it it in Iran with military force, and not even that worked (so far)...
This is the only concrete prediction in the entire essay.
And it simply cannot happen. For one, you will need billions worth of compute.
"Given the acceleratung rate of virus manipulation in labs, its my worry that in 6-12 months a virus could scape a take over the world and collapse health systems."
If a CEO of a health company was saying this, the reactions would not be that chill.
The worst failure of our society is to call this technology AI, intead of something line "artificial general automation". The formes allows the creators to be somehow less responsible of the consequences. The later clearly moves the responsibility to the creator/user.
For now, all the scary hacking things still require an API key to one of the LLM providers. Surely they should take some responsibility for how to turn off the tap.
> How many dollars of compute do you believe were available to the swarm(s)
At least two OOMs more than the dollar value of the damage they'd caused. (Also, as an aside, IIRC, the wiki servers weren't breached; it was just a lot of spam.)
The Internet is big, but one can do quite a lot of damage with ordinary bots and worms that exploit individual widespread vulnerabilities, which LLMs are perfectly capable of writing. Most of the damage also doesn't rely on hitting every long-tail website.
I'm honestly not that concerned about cyber impacts of LLMs relative to other impacts. I just don't like to see the whole concept of being worried dismissed as obviously baseless on the basis of one pretty shaky scale argument.
The former being that these models are helping develop and train future models, but they might not veer too far off in architecture (yet). The latter being the same model being able to train/learn on the fly, in real time, permanently (not just in the current conversation/session).
The latter seems far more likely to go out of control than the former. But, it also seems like it would take an entire paradigm shift. Does anyone in the industry think any of these companies are actually close to that kind of self-improvement?
This certainly looks like a way to slow down competitors and regulate foreign and open models.
It's always about money
I believe Dario has good intentions regarding global agreements. However, I find it difficult believing government’s public statements will match their private behaviors. I would bet that the US government is developing models with potentially devastating capabilities because they cannot guarantee that other countries won’t do the same. Maybe we’ll end up having something like mutually assured destruction with AI models similar to what we have today with nuclear weapons.
First: if they are unilaterally doing it: what about their competitors? Is this a chance for OpenAI to pass them? Or China? If either did, would that be a net-benefit for them or the world?
Maybe this is a ploy for "regulatory capture". And that might help them in the short term. But the rest of the world will continue on. Honestly, it isn't clear to me right now if the winning strategy has as much to do with being the smartest company or simply the one that can command the most compute.
If Anthropic fumbles their IPO and OpenAI scoops them, I don't think I will be happy.
> Transparency. Regardless of what commitments we make, the public deserves to know what is going on. Anthropic has been a supporter of transparency for a long time
And then it goes on tangent of how we should pace everything (not just AI, but also the ingredients of what goes into AI, whatever that means), but only within approved democracies™, and outright restrict everything outside approved democracies™, because reasons that are definitely not about succeeding commercially that is threatened by the most transparent instrument possible - open weights, produced by basically just China.
I wonder what Dario would have done if open weights weren't produced by US's geopolitical adversary. How would an authoritarian manifesto be wrapped then?
Suppose it was, I don't know, Australia producing SOTA open weights, because they believed it was the right thing to do for the benefits of humanity - would Dario propose making Australia a geopolitical adversary too?
> A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives
Social media and big data minted a new scale of "race to the bottom". AI is an exponential step up in the tools for extracting value at scale.
Greed has been around since the beginning, but never so well supported and empowered as it is today.
If Amodei is still human, perhaps he will put his money where his mouth is and attack the source of the perverse incentive. Winning the battle is not the point. The point is to signal to policy-makers and the public that we should not assume corporate revenue-seeking preempts all.
Then again, Anthropic has a board and an upcoming IPO, so guess who's all talk and no meaningful action...
This sounds like pre-IPO hype. They better just try and top astra.
> Crack down on unauthorized distillation / prevent weight theft
Actually hilarious to put that in writing, given the genesis of this entire business model.
The ability of operators to bring new capacity online to service compute is bound by a variety of regulatory and physical/market constraints.
Do folks not understand this?
Anthropic releases models as open weights + more information about how they do training and alignment
"If we execute these measures well, I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important."
This is a pipe dream.
Please play the canned laughter. Probably one of the best comedy lines Dario has written.
Edit: I think back then the rather unpredictable nature and the little added value in deterrence etc. led people to the conclusions that arsenals of those things made little sense (and there was/is public dislike, too). The use was already banned by conventions from the earlie 20th century and the convention then addressed production, development and stockpiles (incl. delivery systems, I think).
I guess all I wanted to point out is, that there can actually be agreement to ban certain technological things pretty comprehensively (outside of some peaceful protective research etc.). Whereas things like SALT are (or were in that case) limiting the number of weapons deployed.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I haven't heard Chinese companies had any kind of unintentional supply chain attack incident like OAI had. All we heard about them so far are humans intentionally doing bad things.
People are not going to slow down because this was brought to them on less than endearing terms. They don't see any of these stated noble intentions.
Claude was already used to cause economic, political and social destruction. As Anthropic is seen doing it, others aren't going to just sit down, read the blog and say, oh, I'll stop developing models because Dario, you touched my heart with your true words.
Solving a disease like cancer as justification for everything else seems like not a great trade off. I don’t say that to dismiss those who have lost people to cancer. But the technology just is being utilized in so many harmful ways and the things it enables: job loss, surveillance, misinformation, just feel like problems that aren’t worth it. Have we even heard of a solved diseases? If anything haven’t we heard that ai will make even worse bio warfare?
It's this kind of argument where the mask sort of slips because it always has to be an argument that also has the benefit of enriching himself and his friends.
It gets to the point that by Occam's Razor the more likely and reasonable explanation is that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman are just actually afraid of the disastrous impact ASI may have on the world, and that the race they're in is not good, and calling for help to governments in form of regulation and an international treaty.
In early interviews with people like Dwarkesh he's the likable geek gushing about scaling laws, animated and able to maintain eye contact with the interviewer. He is now a different person - a political manipulator with a bizarre unsettled interview demeanor avoiding eye contact and looking from side to side. I
Props to Amodei for his accomplishment in creating Anthropic and so rapidly catching up with OpenAI, but technical and/or managerial chops is no qualification for being the custodian of the safety of society or the best positioned to predict the impacts of what he is relentlessly creating, and impending wealth of billions of dollars makes him hopelessly compromised as an unbiased source for the actions (shutting down the competition) he is advocating for.
It's notable that for all the fear mongering of China and open weight models, that all we see in terms of inadequately contained and unaligned models are US ones, from Anthropic and OpenAI. I highly doubt that the Chinese government would tolerate, even for a second, any company creating something that threatened government control - if this was happening in China then the individuals responsible would quickly be punished.
It is perhaps interesting, but ultimately irrelevant given where we are, to consider did it have to be this way - was there a smarter/safer way (I'd say yes) to create reasoning systems other than via RL that creates the relentless goal seekers we are seeing, even though this would always have existed as a potential future threat that someone could have built.
Amodei wants regulation, and it seems the way he has managed his company he needs to get it, but in far more severe ways than he is asking for. There is certainly truth to the argument that the US needs SOTA AI for fight malevolent or uncontrolled AI from whoever may be wielding it (foreign or domestic), so stopping/pacing development is not the answer - this really needs to be treated as a national security issue, and this type of AI tech need to move to government control, not private.
Less capable, and more safely designed, AI does not need to be banned, but Amodei/Altman/Musk as defenders of national security sends shivers down my spine.
1) AI is a dangerous technology that can literally end the world.
2) Only me and a handful of other [people like me] should be trusted to determine who can use it and how.
3) The state must use its coercive power to support my control of this technology to the exclusion of [people not like me].
I don't think that people outside of tech think the problem with "tech billionaires" is that they occasionally support some limited regulation. There's a weird form of tech populism that takes as axiomatic that any government intervention is "regulatory capture" and insists the only way to combat the power of big tech is unfettered capitalism that seems bizarrely prevalent on HN given how little sense it makes in a normal political context. Like, Bernie Sanders' position here is simple to understand: ban it. But on HN you'll see people framing the side with Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel on it as against "tech billionaires".
This article explicitly asks for the US government to step in and push for further restrictions on model distillation, access to open frontier weights, and access to hardware. It also pushes heavily for independent auditors to monitor and control "AI companies" and for greater observation and control over of what people use AI models for and who provides them.
I don't see anything in the essay about restricting open frontier weights.
If you want to argue that the US has no right to be restricting technological development elsewhere, you have a case. But why tie this to free-market pseudo-populism against basic, domestically-scoped safety regulation?
Lobbying for a completely parallel regulatory framework to restrict who is allowed to run specific types of general purpose computer programs, just because we can imagine that some of those "general purposes" might be bad, feels a lot more like an attempt by capitalists to carve out a special kingdom over this specific technology for themselves.
For example, I'd be 100% in favor of holding anthropic criminally liable any time their AI enables someone to commit a crime. But I'm opposed to banning the export of GPUs above a certain size just because Dario doesn't trust what someone like me would do with them if he couldn't snoop on my conversations.
However the real reason to slow down is more of how it's introduced to the economy. Hypereautomation will kill jobs and destroy the economy. I work as an AI engineer and companies are delivering products at vibe coding speeds to kill jobs and at the same time automating internally. All companies are doing this at the same time and the target it sto eliminate workers.
Most people are so extremely slow to pick this up. How hard can it be to understand what hyperautomation does to the workforce? Companies are desperate to surrivive and they will do all it takes to lower their costs and at the same time not loose to competitors. Its Wild West out there.
What do you think that were going to hyper automate?
Did my gardener get faster? How about the plumber I need? Are you going to speed up the coroner? Are nurses going to be able to handle 2x the patients because of your work?
All AI has done, so far, is devalue software. It did that by democratizing its creation. We're delivering on the promise of VB script, and Apple Script and IFTT, and every drag and drop coding tool ever.
> companies are delivering products at vibe coding speeds
Who? Make me a list of companies saying that "We moved the needle with AI" who arent AI companies? I can name a couple - Grindr being the biggest name. Thats the really interesting use case here - because it's a niche product with a small team who is generating outsized value. AI tooling enables more of that - it's going to chip away at SAAS companies - their one sized fits all solutions are going to get eaten by smaller more efficient companies that are far more vertical focused.
You need to step outside the bubble of tech and look at the real world, on the ground, because it doesn't look anything like the SF Bay Area.
This is called malware and creating and distributing it is a felony. Why is this not called out ?.
This and related quotes seem to attempt to place some of the burden on the US Government as opposed to themselves. It seems to be a trend that Anthropic wants to be able place some of the burden of preventing distillation on parties other than themselves.
Preventing distillation is fundamentally their problem. Whenever it happens, it is primarily due to their security efforts not being able to prevent it. I'm tired of seeing them play the blame game and divert responsibility. Sure there is a level of national concern, but the response could simply be the government placing stronger controls on Anthropic themselves. If they are unable to prevent distillation, then the solution may be to literally limit their distribution until they are capable of doing so effectively.
> A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute
I also think it is ironic that they're planning an IPO while also talking about a race to the bottom due to commercial incentives. These are fundamentally at odds. Being a public company means you are beholden to investors and a board with the primary goal of making more money. What higher commercial incentive is there than that.
If commercial incentives are as dangerous as he states, potentially becoming one of the largest public IPO's and largest traded companies in history a pretty strange way to reduce the risk of commercial incentive risks.
Dario: We gotta pace the frontier!
Sam: How do you pace a frontier? The frontier's not goin' anywhere. It's right where it was, just go out and explore it!
Dario: Sam, I'm tellin' ya, ya gotta pace it! Things are getting very doomy out there, and Dario's gettin' upset!
This is impossible. The capability keeps advancing regardless. More people use AI, that feedback is used for reinforcement, that reinforcement makes the model better. Not just in the US, but for every lab and model. Whether it's distilled or direct reinforcement, same result. You can't keep the whole world from working on AI.
> it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet [..] and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails
If true, then what we need isn't guardrails or less-capable AI. We need an internet that isn't fragile. If the infrastructure is vulnerable, the answer isn't to make a law that asks tool-makers to blunt their tools. The answer is to fix the goddamn infrastructure. Today it's almost trivial to take down large parts of the internet (happens by accident all the time). This should've been solved ages ago.
We didn't have the motivation to fix it before, but now we do. But Dario's answer isn't to fix things. It's to hold back progress so we can maintain the status quo (shitty infrastructure) and he can keep his company making billions of dollars. He could be calling for fixing these things. But he'd rather go the easy route, which just happens to advantage his company in the process.
If the US government is really concerned with defense, they need to invest more of their nearly $1T in federal funding towards making the internet safer. They need to do this for us, and other nations, since 1) we depend on the rest of the world for our goods and services, and 2) if other nations are taken down, they can't spend money on our financial and tech services (which are the only industries we have left).
Dario calls for regulation later in the post. If he's okay with government safety regulations for AI software, he should be okay with the same regulations for all software, whether it's AI or not. We need a national software building code, focusing on internet safety.
Amodei tops it off by using diseases to capture the reader's favor. It no longer works, people are just disgusted by it after four years of daily marketing.
How exactly? So far AI has accelerated misinformation at scale and wealth concentration.
There could be an element to truth to it, but it's certainly not the entire story and is just so tiresome at this point.
Also, just out of curiosity, is there any historical precedent for a nascent, fast growing new industry screaming for self regulation?
If you believed it, you would SHUT anthropic or release all models open source.”
And then what? How does that help with slowing down the frontier? Should he shut shop and then grovel Sam’s feet to make it work and become an activist?
Maybe he actually believes the world changing power of AI and hence shoved his entire time into it and half of it has worked out since Anthropic is going to be worth a trillion and he’s terrified of the other half being true too?
1. Artificial intelligence is clearly a vastly dangerous technology with plausible potential for human extinction.
2. This scares people.