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I don’t appreciate being accused of either cope or gaslighting, but fine. Let’s look at the actual data. There are no orbital strikes on data centers. For all of Yud’s bleating, we’re not bombing Chinese GPU clusters. The actual powers that be care more about Chinese involution on electric car prices than they do about Chinese progress in AI. Anthropic - Dario Amodei himself continues to sell frontier (or at least commercial frontier) model access freely at massive scale to mainland Chinese enterprises, and therefore the Chinese state, via thinly veiled Singapore outposts among others. He lobbied against the US government’s export block, and continues to employ Chinese researchers (do you disagree here?) including those who certainly still have extensive familial and social ties to the mainland, even if he has fewer than Musk.
Judge a man by his actions and his words, then.
You read the tea leaves of Amodei’s effective altruism Gates foundation mosquito net vibe blog posts and public statements, lightcone this and that (Self Made Human, with or without AI, is better at this kind of writing, I won’t patronize you by suggesting you aren’t, although I’m pleased you’ve kept your idiosyncrasies). None of this features a single original thought, or anything that would indicate an unusually (among already intelligent people, not relative to population median) intelligence. Amodei’s resumé is impressive, but not exceptionally so in his class. Plenty of people have PhDs from Stanford. As a researcher or scientist, he was thoroughly unimpressive, he cannot even be mentioned in the same breath as Bengio, Sutskever, LeCun. His main contributions at OpenAI were restating the obvious and some wordcel bullshit on scaling and alignment (meaningless, concrete problems could have been a LessWrong blog post). He played no role in the development, engineering or execution of this epoch defining technology. Unlike Altman, he is not even a particularly ruthless, strategic or manipulative businessman (a respectable skillset on its own), he just has a very greedy and social climbing wife who used her not inconsiderable charms to woo investors and force her boyfriend and later husband into the right rooms. His vocabulary is limited in these texts or quotes (strongly correlated with verbal IQ when writing in one’s native language, which he is), his references are basic and surface level. This isn’t me being a snob, but absent more objective psychometric testing our only way of differentiating between the merely quite intelligent (like most successful corporate executives) and the very intelligent is relying on metrics like this.
This is just not a top mind on geopolitics, the future of humanity, etc. I am humble enough to know I may be very wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be much here. These are all platitudes. There is no huge malice toward China, just some generic neolib angst about ‘authoritarian regimes’ and being upset that capitalism didn’t bring democracy. Amodei doesn’t seem to really know anything. His optimism is vague, his thoughts unstructured, he rambles, he cites Obama. And that brings us to the crux of the whole discussion, which I also mentioned above, which is what the actual plan is here. Right now, Anthropic is not independently undertaking anti-China actions to our knowledge. If anything, the US government (the primary actor in anti-China cyber activity) was angry with Anthropic for not offering advanced model access that may have enabled this until quite recently, unlike OpenAI and others. Is Dario going to unilaterally engage in cyber ops against the CCP? Is it just about telling the ASI “liberate the people of China from gommunism by any means necessary”? If it is, Amodei is entirely superfluous, because someone else in the State Dept will input that prompt. If it isn’t, nothing in any of the writing we’ve discussed suggests or even hints that Amodei has a more complex or developed strategy, or the understanding of China that would inform one.
There are no datacenters worth bombing in China yet (bombing is a scary escalation move), and the whole idea is to achieve sufficient advantage that none become worth it. The Chinese are, let's say, not close to developing AGI first. At this rate it is not guaranteed that they'll ever achieve it. I've been looking at what Astra can do for a few hours now; the US has just become a lot more militarily capable, and this advantage will compound in a matter of weeks, not even months. Anthropic is obviously also not showing all cards. I truly wonder if the Chinese officials can even comprehend how disadvantaged they now are and how thin the ice is.
The US has a vast bureaucracy preoccupied with all sorts of small agendas and concerns of their constituencies/lobbyists. What does it matter? If there were no concern about Chinese AI, a smuggled B300 server in Hong Kong wouldn't cost like 4x its Western market price.
This just isn't interesting. Perhaps Anthropic could crack down harder on transfer stations, but meh. What is the point, just making the Chinese marginally less productive? They do what can be done to curb distillation without disrupting legitimate business. He even says repeatedly that the benefits of technology – but not its power – should be distributed widely.
For the record, Claude spontaneously writes insecure code for Russians, when it can clock them. So this service provision is already likely poisoned.
the export block that threatened to lock out half his staff (heavily European/Anglosphere immigrants)?
I am not sure if there remain many PRC citizens working in Anthropic, and I'm sure none have access to important details. Racially discriminating against US citizens is a bit too rich an ask. Far as I know they do background checks. Can you name your favorite Chinese person at Anthropic? Plenty of Han faces at OpenAI.
I understand that you feel insulted, but I think my "tea leaves" are just the most parsimonious, perhaps boring reading of the situation. Amodei's actions are perfectly consistent with his words and you're grasping at rhetorical straws. He's no more kidding about Chyna than he was kidding about the utility of scaling Transformer to AGI since 2017. This is a man who tries to seriously think about "exponentials" and update to the limit, exactly as Yud would advise, exactly as his subculture prescribes, as Leopold (married to Avital Balwit now btw) does… It'd be weird for him to be any other way. I'm out of charitable explanations for your aversion to this straightforward idea.
Putnam HM. He's pretty sharp, could be a quant. Maybe 160 IQ or so. There is a decent number of even smarter people in the US, so what? Though I admit I find his technical bets and execution more impressive than muh Ph.D. Plenty of Ph.Ds who still don't even believe in deep learning.
I don't think you understand that scaling is an unsolved scientific problem, not a matter of executing a python script. It's plausible that nobody on the planet knows how to really train a 20T model and not get slop or collapse, but the people closest to knowing are all at Anthropic. We don't have visibility into their internal IP, and that IP is downstream of Dario's technical bets. Even alignment stuff is good recruitment pitch for research into training dynamics. I believe they're well ahead of OpenAI on the science of pretraining, and scarily ahead of others. Sure, not his scripts, he's not Liang Wenfeng to deign to do the grunt work alongside his lessers, perhaps even chinks. Again, what does it matter? You're talking like he's some nepo baby who found Anthropic in his trust fund.
amusing if Dario is a mere sockpuppet for Camilla Clark, but that'd just mean you're underestimating Camilla instead.
Come on now. So he's a wordcel, but not even a good wordcel? It's "right rooms" all the way down? How did she pick the rooms that get you a Fable? I watch this very intently, and there is currently only one organization that can seriously compete with Anthropic on peak model intelligence. It's called OpenAI. Sam also doesn't strike me as a talented orator. I think he's just a culturally impoverished semi-autist with the standard shitty rationalist taste, and a touch of condescension to the listeners and electorate. Not unlike your own. Do you lecture cab drivers in the manner of this post?
oh boy, Dwarkesh-Stalin would go so hard. It'd blow your mind.
What are we doing here? If a fancy manner of speech were what makes one a significant actor, I'd have had a startup worth hundreds of billions too. But alas, that's a pretty useless perk. Top doers are not necessarily top orators. Speaking of, how do you like Musk's manner of speech and overall public conduct? Doesn't exactly scream "Earth-Space traffic monopolist and the Czar of American Industry». And yet.
You know perfectly well this wasn't about China. For fuck's sake, they killed Khamenei's family precisely the next day.
Claude research how to topple the CCP, make no mistakes. Would do way better than your snark .
Dario would of course much prefer if the state throttles China without blood on his hands.
The Chinese problem is with what Dario means as the head of American private AGI research, not so much his own vendetta.
Dario's strategy, to me. makes great sense. AGI comes first.
I don’t think all the personal insults were necessary. You have been around here long enough that you have been very, very wrong many, many times. And right sometimes. So have I. The posts are mostly still there. Neither of us have exceptional predictive ability, I am humble enough to admit that. I don’t lecture cab drivers, even when they tell me to buy shitcoins at the peak (or gold, as they did earlier this year).
Here is my summary of the argument so far. I make a point that while Dario might be a San Francisco EA liberal who would like China to become a kumbaya liberal democracy like California, I don’t think he’s a zealot, I don’t think he’s willing to die to fight China, and I don’t think his revealed preferences, words or actions suggest someone for whom the above is the case. You argue, based on his statements, some quotes etc, that he hates the Chinese government, the CCP, and Chinese institutions, seeks their overthrow, and believes he has or will shortly has the means to do so, and that he is willing to do whatever it takes to execute, and that this probably makes him (you imply, but don’t state, to be fair) the most dangerous person in the world to the Chinese.
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Huh, is there some story behind this? My impression was that it writes insecure code for most everyone unless handheld/corrected.
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