This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It sure looks like that. Anthropic might not be evil in the actively-building-the-torment-nexus way, but from reading the comments on github they are either saving compute or intentionally sabotaging existing models so that their users will upgrade when the next model comes out, both of which are things one would avoid in companies one does business with.
The obvious solution would be to separate the development and the hosting of the models. So you would pay Anthropic for the license to run the model and Nvidia (or whomever) for the inference, with the idea that the computation provider has no incentive to care whether you prefer this or that model, and will thus simply run it without cutting any corners. Just like Intel does not really care if I run Linux or Windows or whatever on my CPU.
One of the problems would be that the data center would obviously need the node weights (which are probably worth billions to China in a way the binaries of Windows are not), but there are already solutions for that for using LLMs for classified government data. You would not need hundreds of compute vendors which have access to Claude's weights, but perhaps three or four. And of course LLM vendors might whine about having to fix jailbreaks of their models so that they can't be used for bioweapons research (or whatever the scary thing of the day is), but at least people would be notified that their model got mandatory updates, rather than "as of March 8".
I imagine that a LLM company is always living on borrowed time. A business decision which will make you appear as a trustworthy partner, but also decrease the hype for your product and thus give you a few tens of billions less of money to burn might result in you losing your lead and getting sidelined. So instead you hype-maxx, whatever that takes, and if it takes selling tokens below cost to establish that your LLM is the best in a domain, and then later pulling the rug from under your customer base then you simply do that.
This also makes me slightly more pessimistic about ASI alignment. Charitably, it could be "Anthropic cares so much about ASI alignment that they are beyond any lesser concerns than winning the AI race." But realistically, if one side in a civil war decides that their victory is more important than anything and every crime they commit will be worth it a hundredfold once they have won and established their utopia, at least nine times out of ten their envisioned utopia will be some sort of hellscape. Empirically, there seems to be a limit to instrumental convergence in humans, and you can learn a lot about the character of your date by observing how they treat the waiter, or a general by what lines they will cross.
Unfortunately wouldn't work. Provider has every incentive to have you use less compute, and thus could attempt to quantize or mini-fy models it is serving you
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link