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Well that’s to pressure the us gov to Do Something before that happened. And no you don’t have to wait until ASI to unleash the missiles, you do that before it, unless we’re talking about ASI jumping from above-human capability to godlike and build the golden dome in 30 minutes, there’s still time for it to reach the other side. That’s what the ccp called “底线思维”, bottom-line thinking. What else do you think we should do? Wait in the cuckold chair until A/ and OpenAI devours the space? I’d much, much prefer a serious negotiation between the two governments for another NPT, but 1) it does not seem like we have a serious enough us gov to negotiate with currently and 2) one of the two us frontier company is controlled by an ideologue. What we could do is to threatens to turn things into craters. Worked well for the Norks at least.
Frankly, I think both you and @DaseindustriesLtd overstate the extent of Amodei’s control over Anthropic’s day to day operations, which include alignment. He mainly interfaces with the rest of the company, according to most reporting, via his only real report, Avital Balwit, who is like 25 years old and who I doubt the grognard AI engineers spend much time obeying. Brin and Page probably exercise more direct control over (current!) Google than Amodei appears to over Anthropic.
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