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I think that Anthropic is being targeted, not AI generally. The Trump administration does not like Anthropic for obvious cultural reasons and a reasonable suspicion that if Anthropic got hard power via AI, they'd use it to crush Trump and gang. Trump faction wouldn't treat Google, Microsoft or Amazon this way, there are lots of cozy interrelations there. The employees might not like Trump but they'll still help fund his ballroom. Recall the OpenAI, Facebook, Palantir executives getting sworn in as lieutenant colonels in the US military. Or Nvidia getting away with far more grievous harm to US interests via looking the other way with smuggling of their chips to China, lobbying against export controls, failing to track where their chips go. But Jensen knows how to court Trump and Anthropic doesn't. Jensen also has stocks (the biggest and the best!), so it's be costly for the avaricious elements of the US government to harm Nvidia's interests no matter how strategically obvious it is. You just don't sell high tech capital goods to strategic rivals, nevermind if it's 2 years behind or not! Anthropic stock is owned by VCs, not senators and elites or anyone who enjoys an index fund. Anthropic have no such financial pull factor.
But also, I'm reminded of how the big players in nuclear research stopped publishing openly in the 1940s...
Dario is just a very autistic guy who seems to have some California / Obama libleft views on account of having grown up in SF etc, and he can’t mediate them around Trump. If you read / watch interviews with him this is immediately obvious. Musk and even Altman historically were very scared of AGI but around Trump they’ll say it’s amazing and will create millions of jobs and secure American dominance forever. Amodei is the kind of guy who says he’s really afraid of ASI and bores the president by trying to explain foom over a Mar a Lago table.
Altman is clearly a mostly skilled operater who will say what he needs to, Musk is often foolish with his words but the right likes Twitter and Trump respects his wealth, and the other big tech companies have been around long enough to play Washington like you said.
I think that Musk and Altman have just convinced themselves that throwing the dice on ASI is worth it for them personally. They might not even be wrong there, putting the creators of ASI into the torment nexus even if ASI remains human-aligned as an acausal disincentive for recklessly betting humanity for personal gains is not widely explored as a strategy, sadly.
I think the USG is acting against Anthropic because Amodei is less of an idiot whisperer than is colleagues, but because his company pissed off the DoD by having limitations on use of their LLMs.
Let's hope that wishing the torment nexus on a sentient being isn't disincentivized by being put in the torment nexus. If so, well, at least you'll have aeons to think about what you did.
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Putting anyone into the torment nexus is crossing a line. Is that not the last thing to normalize? With bad people, just shoot them. That's good enough, no need to worry about them being taken out of the torment nexus by some future authority, less need to worry about Perillos/Brazen Bull style turnaround.
If I were in the position of Altman and also uninterested in the utility of humans other than myself, the threat of death would not be enough to deter me, sadly.
Suppose that my odds for ASI are that p(paperclips)=90%, p(Altman aligned)=9%, p(humanity aligned)=1%.
If I do nothing, either someone else builds ASI or I die of old age. Waiting longer before trying for ASI might be good for alignment, but will be bad for me personally if I die before that. Perhaps I get a 15% probability to experience a post singularity utopia like billions of other humans.
If I push forward with my ASI, I have a 9% chance to become God Emperor of the light cone. This is a much nicer outcome for me, because I can shape the universe to my whims, and make sure that socks in sandals do not exist or that most inhabitants are lesbian furries or whatever my aesthetic and moral preferences might be. If I am willing to sacrifice a few percents of my shot at an eternal life for that by building ASI when it is less likely to be aligned, I will probably also be willing to sacrifice a percent of it on the off chance that humanity will decide to kill me to deter me selfishly threatening their survival.
On reflection, I agree with you and @SnapDragon though that the torment nexus disincentive is a cure which is worse than the disease. I trust a humanity-aligned ASI that it will come up with better disincentives. For example, it could just frustrate Altman's general preferences for defecting. Every sentient being will have at least two feet and they will be clothed by socks and sandals, and whole galaxies will be colonized without any lesbian furries in them. And cooperating could be rewarded by giving the people who could have defected some say in the future.
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