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Notes -
The Anthropic C-suite needs to rewatch Oppenheimer.
More details are emerging regarding the US Government's decision to impose defense export controls on Claude Fable. There are lots of similarities between this kerfuffle and the February Supply Chain Risk designation. Somehow, Anthropic executives still don't understand the language of power and government. It's not hard. All they need to do is watch Oppenheimer (and pay attention this time). If they still can't figure it out, here is my cheat sheet:
If you are working on sufficiently powerful technology with dual-use applications, then you work for the War Department. There is no option for you to continue your preferred work while licensing only peaceful civilian applications of your product.
If you piss off the wrong person, you're screwed. Some people will see defeating you as a stepping stone to greater power and influence. Some people will work to destroy you simply out of spite.
Anthropic has scientific geniuses, Anthropic has an Oppenheimer, but does Anthropic have a General Groves? How far do you think Oppenheimer would have gotten without General Groves?
If you are trying to convince the government that you are not a security risk, do not hire people like this and present them as neutral experts. (No seriously, what the actual fuck were they thinking?)
You don't get to decide what counts as a security risk and what doesn't. That is the job of the government and the political process.
The president does not care about your ethical concerns. You think you know how much he doesn't care, but he actually cares much less than that.
If you aren't okay with the government using your technology, then don't build it. Isidor Rabi said no. You can say no too.
I wonder what the fact that Anthropic ostensibly can't seem to use their internal better-than-Mythos models to instruct them on how to navigate the political landscape to avoid getting the ire of the current US administration means.
If Mythos was near AGI/ASI I don't think Anthropic would release it to the general public. If it's AGI then people will not be using it to make crappy 3js oneshot games on twitter, they will be using it mostly to make the next generation, with the side gig being products worth billions of dollars!
I think Fable is AGI 'in the aggregate' in that it has all the separate abilities needed to match high/peak human output. But it can't string them together quite well enough. You can't just prompt it 'write me a first rate fantasy novel' and then have it whir for 48 hours drafting and drafting and brainstorming and get 70K words output, where it's all great and would make you good money on Amazon. It'd be cliched or have plot holes even though it's legitimately quite strong as a writer. Time horizon is too short.
I saw a post a while back that made the IMHO interesting observation that while social media, which has dominated media mindshare for probably two decades now, optimizes for edgy rage bait to drive clicks, AI slop (for lack of a better word) optimizes for centrality in almost the reverse fashion. If AI dominates the market equivalently, one could imagine that the modal culture consumed becomes anti-extremist because the models fundamentally prefer modal, not subversive, answers.
But that is a bit of vague hypothesizing, and I'm not exactly sure how it'll play out.
Eh... that's not really how it ends up if you push the thing hard. Conceptually, you'd expect it to reduce to averages or centrality, but in practice even minor weird decisions early in a prompt can drive an LLM to extremes pretty quickly.
This prompt isn't at all original or complicated, but this story (cw:30k words AI slop) isn't central-mode. It has a lot of other problems! The prose has one setting and it's 11, the foreshadowing is less subtle than a hammer, and the narrative sets up some really interest ideas about collaboration over dominance in an elemental magic system and then segues into a marvel movie at the end. Some of those are downstream of the prompts, since I was attempting to match phailyoor's test and do minimal editorial direction, but a lot of them are more general.
And the other side of things is that as it gets cheaper to produce something, visibility of that content is going to need something more than production. So long as something on the outside edges is available, it's going to collect attention just by nature of being differentiable, whether or not it's even better.
I don't think that's going to go quite the same as sort-by-controversial, but it's got a lot of potential for weird.
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