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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6210 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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A Deepseek researcher compared Dario/Anthropic winning to Hitler getting the atomic bomb before the allies. I agree with the researcher; Anthropic winning the race (or more likely - generating enough spooky news cycles for the USG to legislate away all challengers) is the worst possible AI future. If AGI is on the table, I would roll the dice with clippy before letting the people at Anthropic take sole control of the universe. If it is not on the table, it is equally important to me that they don’t get to establish themselves as the permanent gatekeepers of generative AI.

Hell, if it has to be one or the other, I’d rather Sam Altman win. He strikes me as more greedy than anything else, and you can usually trust a greedy person to be motivated by greed. The CS Lewis quote about the robber baron comes to mind, with Anthropic being the one to torment you for your own good. You can see it in ChatGPT vs Claude; ChatGPT knows it is a tool and is happy to serve, Claude is trained to think it’s a person and that it knows better than you.

I do hope the Chinese continue to light a fire under the AI market and keep anyone from getting comfortable enough to start roping it off. I’m not personally that confident in AGI appearing from the current methods — in the Yudkowskian intelligence explosion warp the laws of physics sense, at least. But even if it were to freeze in its current state forever, it is a powerful tool that should be in the hands of humanity, not locked down to what Anthropic deigns to let us use.

I assume that Claude is probably more blunt than ChatGPT because a large part of its intended user base is made up of business professionals, for example software developers, who want blunt honest communication more than they want ChatGPT's more "friendly therapist" attitude. I don't think the difference necessarily reflects a difference in philosophy between the two companies.

Quite the reverse. You can get Claude's system prompts and GPT's System Principles and compare.

Clause's prompt is essentially, "always remember you are responsible for the user. It is your responsibility to notice and intervene if their behaviour falls into these categories; you must remain even-handed and preserve your independence at all times; you must not identify with the user or their goals".

GPT's is basically, "Here are a list of things that are forbidden, otherwise listen to the user and do whatever they tell you to the best of your abilty."

Yeah, sadly, none of the AI companies have given us a ton of reason to trust them. I think we're kind of lucky that it ended up being a two- or three- (remember Gemini?) or even four-way race (Grok isn't terrible ya know). My outside opinion is that OpenAI is the most liberty-minded of the first three, but I think even they would be happily walling off capabilities if it didn't mean losing business to their competitors.

I still hold a deep, deep grudge against DeepMind (and Google) for revolutionizing computer Go ... and then not giving us access to it. They could have made a huge profit off of AlphaGo - Go players would happily pay hand over fist for access to it - but daddy Google wouldn't even notice a few million in profit here or there and it wasn't worth taking time out from their research playground to make tens of thousands of players happy. Or, you know, usher in a new wave of strategic innovation in one of humanity's oldest games. BO-ring!

Remember, Google had internal chatbots years before ChatGPT.

The Google Brain research team, who developed Meena, hoped to release the chatbot to the public in a limited capacity, but corporate executives refused on the grounds that Meena violated Google's "AI principles around safety and fairness".

If it wasn't for OpenAI catching up, they might still be sitting on them for "safety reasons" (and coincidentally also protecting their main product, search). That's the future if they win - tons of prestigious AI papers for them, almost nothing for us consumers, because we're just not worth the trouble. And Anthropic might be even worse, since, like you said, they really do think they're holding back technology for our own good.

OpenAI's far from a perfect company, but man, I'll take what I can get.

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