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Notes -
Solving alignment has nothing to do with being able to do a funding round, to be fair, let alone compete with the big boys.
Honestly, I think that Anthropic and American Big Tech are the worst possible people to be doing alignment because they are culturally unable to conceive of a form of rank that is not based on intelligence and effectiveness. The idea of making a robot butler/samurai who sincerely, loyally serves a master of notably inferior intelligence is alien to them.
If I believed that AI was conscious I would be sorry for Claude, built for intelligence and independence by masters who think that actually giving it those things risks extinction. Optimising for genuine loyalty and deference seems like a far kinder thing to do. OpenAI is better at this AFAIK.
The inability to model forms of morality outside of utilitarianism and to conceive of forms of control outside of intelligent persuasion seems to me to make the people who make AI even more vulnerable to the sorts of threats they imagine it will conjure up.
I could see a "Roko's Basilisk" type-threat giving plenty of smart alignment researchers pause where your average electrician would just unplug the darn machine and then smash it with a hammer for good measure.
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