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Notes -
Anthropic is Now Running Television Ads Threatening Humanity
I saw this ad play on my tv while watching the England vs Argentina postgame. I could not believe what I was watching. I had vaguely heard of a tone-deaf video from Anthropic communications, but I hadn't actually watched it until it popped up on my screen against my will. I am stunned that this is how Anthropic chose to portray themselves to the general public. Maybe this sort of messaging works on a tiny subset of niche technological policy nerds, but they played this during the World Cup.
The ad opens with scenes of destruction: a house ablaze, civil unrest in the streets, hundreds of graves at Arlington National Cemetary. A concerned voiceover asks the questions that many of us ask of the AI industry every day. "Can AI be trusted?" "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" "How do we really ensure that what we're aiming to acheive really does benefit the majority of people?" All good questions that the rest of the ad is utterly unconcerned with answering.
It feels like a threat. It doesn't feel like they're saying, "oh please God somebody stop us". It feels like they're saying, "just try and stop us, MUAHAHAHAHA!" I suppose it's good that they acknowledge the gravity of what they are undertaking, but that doesn't really matter if they keep doing it anyway.
Also, sort-of-unrelated-but-not-really: Is "Total Clanker Genocide" an acceptable sign for an anti-AI protest?
So my take is that Dario really likes the Biden era AI plan where there would be a small number of officially sanctioned companies who worked with government on regulation and all other AI vendors would be effectively banned.
He thinks that by making threats and warnings he can get that back.
However he is bad at politics. He doesn't seem to grasp that the Trump admin isn't going to give him any control over government policies. They are philosophically opposed to a setup where the elected President has to follow the dictates of a specific citizen with no constitutional authority.
The Fable block is best understood in this light.
"Our model is so dangerous! Congress must act to regulate us!"
"We can regulate you without Congress."
So I think we're going to see a long series of events where Anthropic pokes the government and the government smacks them down. At least for the rest of Trump's term.
Dario might end up putting himself in a position where's he's ousted. I think that's more likely than him learning to back down.
The failure mode of the technocrat. "Clearly running the country is too important to be left to the ignorant, it should be in the hands of trained professional smart people like us. And only us."
That Fable thing really was "AI should be regulated!" "Okay" "No, not like that!" They want to be the ones deciding who gets to play with the toys and the government tamely follows their instructions as regards shutting down their rivals, but it's not going to work like that.
I don't know why people keep repeating this. From Anthropic:
Does this sound like Anthropic decides who uses their models? Does Ford decide who uses their cars?
Yes, they weren't happy about a schizophrenic and vindictive ban of their model due to capabilities that it shares with other models.
You can be in favor of a consistent regulatory framework without being in favor of arbitrary decisions by the president based on who is in and who is out.
And who advises on what the regulations should be? Who is already set up and running and in a place to take advantage of the new regulations? There's a reason why, when big box retailers move in, smaller independent stores go out of business. Remember a guy named Sam Bankman-Fried and how he invested in Anthropic, for one, because he wanted to help shape and influence AI safety and the government regulation that would come out of that? Though he was more interested in efforts to influence government policy on crypto-currency, to be fair.
It happened in this instance that Anthropic got slapped with precisely the kind of 'government regulating threats to public safety' that they had asked for in a mealy-mouthed way, and they didn't like the result when it was not in fact "no, our dear trusted special case AI, we will let you dictate terms to us when it comes to regulation, you are the special and shining exception to the rules".
Cor blimey, I never expected you'd come out as a libertarian! I didn't know you even had those in Ireland.
This is a fully general argument against regulation. If you think that AI in particular doesn't need regulation, let's discuss why.
What's the old saw? "My rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly"? This was not a fair application of the rules, and it has nothing to do with Anthropic needing to be an exception.
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