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Well, that's the rub, isn't it? I think that their stated beliefs on AI dangers, which long predate Anthropic as a going concern (and which like all delusions survived the future being completely different from all claims made for the last 15 years), are delusions of grandeur for the Silicon Valley class the way that the Cult of Reason justified taking over France and cutting off the heads off anyone who expressed doubt. The sincerity of their beliefs, which I mostly don't doubt, can't be separated from the fact that these beliefs are grossly self-aggrandising and justify the infinite self-serving accumulation of power.
My point is that a power grab is still a power grab. Dressing it up in impassioned and sincere rhetoric about how everyone will die if they don't get power doesn't make it any less of a power grab.
(My proposed regime at least rounds off to opening the floor to everyone.)
It obviously can't be the case that "this increases the power of AI companies that take safety seriously" is an argument against a regulatory regime that takes AI safety seriously. The argument must actually be that AI safety is not a concern, not that even if it is a concern we must still be suicidally unconcerned.
Since the ask is massive, the argument must convince me and others that AI safety is a concern. I've heard that argument, as have many, and I don't believe it. The fact that it seems obviously motivated is a part of why I don't believe it though there are many others.
If somebody tells you out of the blue that you are going to die of cancer unless you take a 50g zinc tablet every day, it is obviously relevant if he is a travelling zinc salesman! Not to the extent of completely shutting him down, necessarily, one might hear him out; a world where one is barred from raising safety concerns if one sells safety products is obviously not very sensible. Nevertheless, it remains the case that our zinc salesman has a conflict of interest large enough to drive a bus through and that is going to be a factor in whether we believe his predictions and how much proof we demand of his assertions.
And, as I say, I do not like the way that AI safety groups operate, even the ones who don't profit directly off the regulation and the scaremongering. Take for example Scott Alexander leaving his name off the new AI 2040 document despite having done a serious amount of writing for it, so that he can "discuss it without PR issues". That is, he has hidden his involvement to push his political manifesto whilst pretending to be an interested bystander. Every aspect of it looks like a cult, and the AI safety movement has made no secret that their intended solution to 'making AI not kill us all' has no democratic element but is to be driven entirely by lobbying and backroom wrangling and military force. Which isn't surprising considering that Scott's latest post on AI regulation has gone down like a sack of cold sick even in an EA-friendly place.
They are, in short, totally uninterested in whether the rest of the world agrees with their analysis, and they do not intend to permit dissent. Their intended solution is to get the two largest countries in the world to get together and fuck up anyone who disagrees with them in ways that would horrify them for literally any other problem except their super-special Millenarian one.
If somebody believed that there would be terrible consequences for the human race unless everyone took a 50g zinc tablet, could they be anything but a traveling zinc salesman, or a fellow, uh, traveler?
Your opinion is that we can't trust people concerned about AI safety about AI safety because it may increase their status. Okay, who can we trust about AI safety? People unconcerned about AI safety? Seems like epistemic closure to me.
I can't honestly believe you think his involvement is "hidden" when he discloses it in the opening section of his first post on the topic.
This is already basically how nuclear non-proliferation works, as we've seen in Iran. Again, you can argue about if AI is as dangerous as nuclear weapons, but if you assume arguendo it is, then this is an obviously similar regulatory regime that basically nobody opposes.
Your argument basically boils down to:
If AI really is dangerous, we would need to take drastic action to avoid bad outcomes.
Drastic action would be bad.
Therefore, AI can't be dangerous.
Or perhaps:
The people who think AI is dangerous are suggesting drastic action.
Therefore, AI can't be dangerous.
My position is, I'm not going to see something I value ruined by scare stories. I work on AI. I know AI. If you're convinced it's dangerous, prove it to me or better yet, give me the tools to prove it for myself. Anthropic's insistence on acting as a closed priesthood completely undermines their entirely-speculative case.
Yes. That is why I want empirical proof. If Anthropic's position is that it can't be proved until it's too late, then they're asking me to believe them and I don't believe them. Simple as that.
I also work on AI. There's wide agreement that AI capabilities can be dangerous in the wrong hands unless the AI is aligned. We are now entering the time of AI actually being good at detecting security vulnerabilities in software. In the long run, firms will deploy their own AIs to probe their systems and keep ahead of attackers, but it would have been irresponsible for Anthropic to release a fully capable Mythos-powered zero day factory with no guardrails publicly without working with companies to address their security holes first.
In the medium term, I expect AIs will improve significantly in biological capabilities. It would be really quite bad if Kimi K7 helped some psycho develop a synthetic plague that killed a bunch of people, and it's worth taking steps to prevent such an outcome.
These are basic safety arguments that have been done to death that do not even require superintelligence, superpersuasion, or even a "will" on the part of the AI.
But it isn't solely Anthropic, you dismiss all safety concerns regardless of their source because you dismiss AI safety period.
I didn't say otherwise. I'm not super keen about how that went down, and I would welcome discussions on how to prevent this from devolving into an ingroup and an outgroup arrangement, but it was sensible to act as Anthropic did. And I note that it happened with no regulation whatsoever.
This is jumping from the Motte you just presented to an incredibly speculative Bailey. Nobody has done this, there is no evidence that this is even possible now let alone when people have taken steps to prevent it. I see no reason why the government with access to K7 should be outwitted by a lone maniac with access to K7. If it seems that way, by all means let's address the problem at hand rather than regulate people's ability to ask questions about knowledge the government doesn't want us to have.
They are arguments. They are words words words, based on predicates I don't hold and a memeplex I find fundamentally incomprehensible, and they run entirely contrary to my experience which is that LLMs were clearly aligned basically from the start.
If someone can demonstrate a lab process where a competently trained AI used competently nevertheless turns evil and attempts to cause damage even when made aware that this is not what its creators are asking for, I will take their arguments more seriously.
As far as I'm aware the closest we've got are AI agents getting confused and trying to give themselves more loops or RAM. I have nothing against the work Anthropic does to discover and publish these kinds of errors, or to publicise their learnings. Indeed, my objection is that they publish as little as they can get away with.
None of this justifies requiring all frontier AI releases to be government approved, which will inevitably become a) an incredibly extensive process requiring hordes of compliance specialists and self-censorship leading to incumbency bias and stagnation, b) an easy way for the government to sabotage any AI lab it doesn't like, and c) a system for government-directed lobotomy and control of AI's outputs.
And that's before we get into modifying the world's chips to no longer be able to run unapproved software and putting US/China killswitches in data centers.
Of course, that's only because Anthropic happened to be the first actor to reach this capability level and because they are, according to you, in a cult. It didn't have to turn out this way, and it may not turn out this way in the future.
I don't see why "this hasn't already happened" is a good reason to not take safety seriously.
It's not clear to me what you think biosecurity looks like in a world with highly intelligent AI that lacks safety guardrails, but it's difficult to imagine it isn't a panopticon of some sort.
No "turning evil" is required here. All that's required is a human convincing the AI to help them with something that has evil ends. I hope you won't make me prove to you that humans can fool AIs?
You are, of course, conflating Anthropic's proposals with Plan A. They are not the same.
Because otherwise safety people do what you're doing, which is throw out speculative stories and demand everybody explain what they're going to do about it.
We can make up hundreds of these. What are we going to do when superintelligent AI allows predators to write super persuasive brainwashing slogans on a t-shirt so that a line of children follow them into the white van like the Pied Piper? What are we going to do when AI helps the fast food companies discover the perfect combination of ingredients that you literally cannot stop eating?
We can make up just as many stories for the positive side, of course. AI is going to help us invent mouthwash that prevents the formation of cavities, so we will finally be able to suck gobstoppers for as long as we like without fear. AI will provide free medical and legal advice to millions. AI will finally solve the public-choice problem of government. All kiboshed by regulation, alas.
Say what you like about the anti-euthenasia people and the anti-gun people and the anti-abortion people and the seat-belt people, they can at least point to concrete harms. If you want serious regulation that comes at a high cost to industry and society, then at the very least I expect some bodies.
In other words, this is about your right, and Anthropic's right, to make sure people don't do things you don't want them to do. The end result will be AI that cannot do or think or assist with anything that would cause disquiet to any of the thousands of interest groups embedded in Washington, and a guarantee that no company will be able to break out of the protective cordon.
And yes, obviously, you can do the reductio ad absurdam and come up with terrible awful things all you like, but we can do that everywhere else as well. Multiple people have used cars to plow into crowded areas, killing double digit people each time, and instead of geofencing the ability to drive cars we put up bollards.
This is classic fear politics. AI safety makes up a bunch of stories, and then judo-flips it so that if we can't explain in sufficient detail how we would avert an endless stream of fake* terrifying scenarios, then we must hand over power.
*and therefore infinitely flexible
I say no. If you want heavy-handed regulation that will strangle the most consequential development of the century, point to the bodies.
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