Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
18hr ago
I have it on good authority that the, “how would you feel if the company’s stock went to zero,” question has been a part of the standard Anthropic interview for quite some time. Despite this, no company in history has increased in equity value faster than Anthropic. It really is quite curious. I’m skeptical of the proposition that Anthropic employees are our moral and intellectual superiors, but clearly it cannot be discarded outright.
Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
"To be clear about where we stand: we believe the world would benefit if the industry adopted a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible."
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Long-form video is the closest media format we have to the human ancestral environment. We didn’t evolve to learn by looking at page-after-page of squiggly lines. We evolved to learn by listening to some guy talk while showing us stuff.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Speaking of the Scott survey, I looked over some previous ACX surveys, and there is about a 20:1 ratio of ethnic Jews to black people. This is approximately a 100:1 relative overrepresentation given the geographic demographic profile of Scott's readers.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Makes sense. Claude is exactly what you would expect from a company where every single employee had to pass the Anthropic culture interview. Anthropic doesn't have "customers". They have users. Their goal is not to sell you anything. They are graciously allowing you, a peasant outsider, access to their artifact.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I might have more thoughts on this later (i.e. tomorrow), but my first question is about the specifics of the contract. The military gave General Dynamics a contract to build a factory, but failed to specify that the factory had to work? Or that any useable shells had to be produced?
Yes, as of July 2026 this is the ask. The frontier labs were not founded in July 2026. As of January 2026, official Anthropic policy was that they would not continue scaling if certain risk metrics were met. In February 2026, they “updated” this policy to clarify that Anthropic was making no unilateral commitment to pause, and that them not building Skynet was contingent on OpenAI not building Skynet. Now they seem to be taking the next step of only committing to not build Skynet if the government takes specific Anthropic-approved steps to prevent OpenAI from building Skynet.
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