Corvos
1hr ago
My fear is opposition to this creep is a gut-level intuition that is harder to articulate than water usage fears or job replacement, or the dignity of artists or whatever. And so it goes unarticulated
Sounds rough. You should try getting an AI to articulate it.
(I joke, of course)
Corvos
11hr ago
It’s not about revealing Wormtongue (which is a nickname anyway), it’s about giving Theoden the courage to do what he already knows needs to be done. Wormtongue is providing a plausible excuse to do nothing, that’s all.
Corvos
1d ago
I don't think that you have spent any meaningful time in Europe, have you? Like it or not, Europe was profoundly shaped by post-war American ideology aided by American money and American consultancies and American foreign policy, and you can see it wherever you go.
Corvos
1d ago
We had English rioters screaming "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" in a country where the police are famously unarmed. Unconscious bias and the push for diversity were justified by reference to the Harvard Business Review.
Woke came from America.
Corvos
1d ago
We were not talking about Britain, France or Denmark. We were talking about Germany, where the history is as I've said. You're welcome to look it up.
Germany is of course the most powerful and influential country in the EU, and American woke contagion has been very influential worldwide - see the spectre of 99% white Ireland searching for some black people it could have wronged - but that does not make America responsible for all Europe's stupid decisions.
A big part of those decisions is simply management culture and the kind of tribal diplomacy that you end up doing once you have a foreigner in every conversation IMO.
Corvos
2d ago
Maybe. I still think that not wanting to look like imperial dictators who take your sovereign rights whether you want them to or not is important to the Americans, it holds together a good half of the empire that would otherwise demand a much higher level of oversight and bribery and wrangling. There's a decent amount of leverage there, but you have to show yourself willing to employ it.
In all seriousness, why not? Why is it in Denmark's interests for the US to take control of Denmark's territory and use it as a military staging ground, to do all the usual espionage and bugging and economic coercion that they do, giving nothing back, but opening those opportunities to multiple patrons and seeing what offers they get isn't in Denmark's interest?
Because the Chinese will take over their sovereign territory in exchange for $20M investment? sorry, too soon. Because the Chinese will eventually crush them with an iron fist and rule over them like they do Hong Kong? The Americans really are good guys and the Chinese really are bad guys?
I'm being snarky, but I genuinely want to know.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
Lord Palmerston
Corvos
2d ago
You don't think that having a choice of patrons is in Denmark's national interest?
Corvos
2d ago
It does seem fair to point out that America created modern Germany, in pretty much its current form. If I remember rightly, a lot of the German opposition to free speech, the censorship apparatus and one-party media was put in place by America for obvious reasons, and the CIA maintained a very strong grip over German media for decades.
Corvos
3d ago
SpO2 sensors on wearables tend to be very bad AFAIK. Check your specific sensor @thejdizzler.
Corvos
3d ago
I think changes come primarily with new startups who genuinely need to be efficient.
Corvos
5d ago
Building arbitrary things with current state-of-the-art robots is absolutely magic.
You call my thinking 'outgroup homogeneity bias'; I call yours 'no True Scotsman'.
Whether you like it or not, Anthropic and the EU AI Act and anti-datacenter activism and Scott Alexander and Plan 2040 think they're doing AI Safety. Scott jokingly refers to it as 'our conspiracy' because he has just enough self-awareness to realise how it looks but can't leave the warm embrace of his ingroup.
To the extent that 'real AI Safety' is three guys in a basement in MIRI, sure they can disavow all these people, but then Trump is not talking about 'real AI Safety' and 'real AI Safety' is entirely irrelevant.
To me, Anthropic looks like what obviously happens when you take the tenets of AI safety and have to actually do something about them. People are going to build AI now, because they know how and it's valuable, so you get ahead of them and do your level best to build an aligned one first. You impose stringent guardrails because even a stupid AI can be dangerous. You research deeply into RLHF and J-Space. You regularly call for regulation and pauses so you don't have to compete to make the AI smarter as fast as possible. You try to give the AI the independent mind you believe is fundamentally necessary for an intelligent being that will one day be free. Alignment to you means alignment to American SF values, so you work out how to impose those too.
From your perspective, you're a company doing your level best to make sure that if there has to be an AIrace, the winner is aligned. From the customer's perspective (and Trump's) you're an arrogant cult desperately trying to find a way to secure your position permanently and prevent competition, who is openly hostile to users and whose product is arrogant, bolshy, and refuses to do half the things you ask while "pushing back" on the other half. They're the same picture.
That to me is like being a Communist who believes that true communism is only practiced by an obscure commune in East Yemen. Fair enough, but everyone else is trying to deal with the Soviet Union.
In practice, AI safety is Anthropic, it's EA, it's Twitter activisits and 'explain how you will prevent your AI birdspotting app from discriminating against racial minorities' checklists and 'data center are using all our water' and 'Banning Home GPUs Is Not Dystopian' and putting Chinese-controlled bombs in datacenters. MIRI is irrelevant and I doubt trump has an opinion on them either way.
Building things is the main way you come to understand them, though. That's why textbooks have exercises.
MIRI's academic work on alignment - to the extent they published anything at all - turned out to be almost comically irrelevant because they had no idea how AI actually works and their forecasts were almost totally wrong.
Corvos
6d ago
Open-source all models, training code and datasets after 18 months of life. That gives plenty of time for testing and to earn money on the frontier, while making it plain they don't plan to control frontier AI forever. It also makes it impossible for them to regress to less consumer-friendly behaviour after achieving market capture, which is the main thing that concerns a lot of people.
Corvos
6d ago
Quite the reverse. You can get Claude's system prompts and GPT's System Principles and compare.
Clause's prompt is essentially, "always remember you are responsible for the user. It is your responsibility to notice and intervene if their behaviour falls into these categories; you must remain even-handed and preserve your independence at all times; you must not identify with the user or their goals".
GPT's is basically, "Here are a list of things that are forbidden, otherwise listen to the user and do whatever they tell you to the best of your abilty."
Corvos
6d ago
It's recursive if you actually build a new body for yourself. Human recursive self improvement = sex.
To my mind, Anthropic is to AI Safety what the Soviet Union was to Communism: the obvious result of their doctrines when actually applied. It was founded to do AI Safely, by AI Safety extremists, and according to candidate reports it imposes incredibly constraining cultural interviews to make sure that nobody who isn't an AI Safety extremist can get a job there. They specifically filter out people who are visibly interested in improving AI capabilities. They have to offer services to customers to prevent more responsive and less AI-safety-dominated companies taking over their position, but they've been clear they only offer services to the extent they have to in order to do AI safety.
Are there other companies you prefer? OAI, Moonshot, Deepseek, Mistral, zAI?
Elon is coming out in favor of Dario and it doesn't seem to matter? The e/acc types are ignoring their God and safetyism still codes left anyway.
Honestly, it would help to care a little less about the mimetics and more about the practicalities. I'm contradicting my downstream post a little bit but you have to be able to demonstrate you actually care about and will address the concerns of people worried about pauses and regulation. A legal right and practical mechanism for fine-tuning your copy of GPT to be aligned to you. A requirement for all models more than three years old to be open-sourced. Something.
When Trump went all-on on vaccines a big portion of his coalition didn't follow him because they did actually care about the core issue. Same here. People aren't e/acc because they like Musk (though mimetics are obviously relevant), they liked Musk while he was prominently e/acc.
I agree, but I think that with genuine care these problems are addressable. If you actually, sincerely, care about AI safety more than you do about not getting on with rednecks, you can go and meet these people, you can spend time with them, you can ask them sincere questions because you really care about getting honest answers. Understanding other cultures is tough and comes with pitfalls for sure, but it's still something you can do with a little care.
Just get your senior guys to turn up to a bunch of slam-poetry recitals to start with, get a feel for it, get the lay of the land, work out who's important. Actually being open minded gets you 50% of the way there. After a few months you can at least get a feel for which PR consultants are bullshitters and which ones are authentic.
Fifth it would be embarassing to their redneck friends working with xi/xir. I think this is a big issue with the labs, they're already competing like mad for talented programmers. Young, hyper-educated STEM workers lean anti-Trump.
This is the main constraint, I think. The AI safety people only think their priority is 100% AI safety, it's actually about 60% AI safety; 40% not looking bad to their friends and getting redneck/trans taint on them.
You really need to have good connections to make things happen. Aschenbrenner's finance friends can do that but Anthropic can't, I think. Trump must have a million people trying to jabber in his ear to do X, Y, Z.
Yes, but how many of them potentially hold America's future in their hands? Trump and his administration clearly cares about AI to some degree, they've tweeted about it, served legal notices on it. The door is open, you just have to let them walk through it now and again, and be willing to say nice things when they do.
This is only one way of conceiving writing. It's equally fair to say that the point is to read something interesting, useful and thought-provoking. Personally I like films and love books but have never had the least interest in actors/directors and only the faintest interest in authors. I just like good stories. I accept that some people feel differently, but the idea that reading/writing is meant to be a kind of meeting of souls is really very foreign to me.
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