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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6355 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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To my mind, Anthropic is to AI Safety what the Soviet Union was to Communism: the obvious result of their doctrines when actually applied. It was founded to do AI Safely, by AI Safety extremists, and according to candidate reports it imposes incredibly constraining cultural interviews to make sure that nobody who isn't an AI Safety extremist can get a job there. They specifically filter out people who are visibly interested in improving AI capabilities. They have to offer services to customers to prevent more responsive and less AI-safety-dominated companies taking over their position, but they've been clear they only offer services to the extent they have to in order to do AI safety.

Are there other companies you prefer? OAI, Moonshot, Deepseek, Mistral, zAI?

To my mind, Anthropic is to AI Safety what the Soviet Union was to Communism: the obvious result of their doctrines when actually applied. It was founded to do AI Safely, by AI Safety extremists, and according to candidate reports it imposes incredibly constraining cultural interviews to make sure that nobody who isn't an AI Safety extremist can get a job there. They specifically filter out people who are visibly interested in improving AI capabilities. They have to offer services to customers to prevent more responsive and less AI-safety-dominated companies taking over their position, but they've been clear they only offer services to the extent they have to in order to do AI safety.

This is the case for them being the good guys, yes. Although I don't think they're as good as you say.

The number 1 rule of AI safety is don’t build the AI that takes over the world. The fact that Anthropic and OpenAI think that the best way to do this is to build superintelligent AI and take over the world has much more to do with Silicon Valley startup culture and utilitarianism than AI safety.

MIRI seems to be the only AI organization that understood the assignment.

The number 1 rule of AI safety is don’t build the AI that takes over the world

No, the number 1 rule of AI safety is "don't build an AI that leads to my enemies putting an end to my politics".

It's laundered through "takes over the world".

That to me is like being a Communist who believes that true communism is only practiced by an obscure commune in East Yemen. Fair enough, but everyone else is trying to deal with the Soviet Union.

In practice, AI safety is Anthropic, it's EA, it's Twitter activisits and 'explain how you will prevent your AI birdspotting app from discriminating against racial minorities' checklists and 'data center are using all our water' and 'Banning Home GPUs Is Not Dystopian' and putting Chinese-controlled bombs in datacenters. MIRI is irrelevant and I doubt trump has an opinion on them either way.

In practice, AI safety is Anthropic, it's EA, it's Twitter activisits and 'explain how you will prevent your AI birdspotting app from discriminating against racial minorities' checklists and 'data center are using all our water' and 'Banning Home GPUs Is Not Dystopian' and putting Chinese-controlled bombs in datacenters. MIRI is irrelevant and I doubt trump has an opinion on them either way.

This is just straightforward outgroup homogenity bias. The AI safety people despise those other groups and intentionally worked hard never to associate with them.

Can you be a bit more clear about this? Who intentionally works hard never to associate with who?

A few clusters off the top of my head that hate each other to varying degrees:

  • The Emily M. Bender/Timnit Gebru woke academic cluster.

  • The Coefficient Giving(aka Open Philanthropy) mainstream EA cluster.

  • The MIRI/Lightcone Infrastructure cluster.

  • Current OpenAI employees.

  • Current Anthropic employees.

The safetyists have worked hard to not be associated with the previous wave of "AI bias" people and the more recent wave of datacenter luddites. There were discussions on whether they should try to harness the popular, but retarded, backlash but wisely decided that polarizing the concept of Safety work was far too important for some cheap support.

There are other rules, though, like "don't introduce Demis to Peter Thiel to help fund his AI to take over the world" and, more broadly, "don't let people know that they can use AI to take over the world."

Isn't MIRI effectively a rock with the words "don't build the AI [that takes over the world]" on it? I don't recall them building anything. By those standards I'm an AI organization too.

You would not expect a "pandemic safety organization" to create novel viruses. It's by no means trivial that an "AI safety organization" should be expected to build AIs, as opposed to brainstorming and lobbying for ways to stop anyone anywhere from building AIs.

You would not expect a "pandemic safety organization" to create novel viruses.

There have been plenty of comments here about how much the CDC and NIH were funding gain of function research, despite a Congressional ban, some of which was done in Wuhan, and some of that proposed included specific mutations later seen in a pandemic coronavirus that first appeared in Wuhan. Whether or not this was the source of said pandemic remains unproven.

Well, quite, but people who believe gain-of-function research caused COVID or might have caused COVID generally agree that gain-of-function research is in fact not the sort of thing a pandemic safety organization ought to have been doing; and that by dabbling in that sort of thing and causing COVID, they failed harder at their intended task than should have been possible. Why should we not treat AI safety organizations which insist on building AIs in the same way?

Building things is the main way you come to understand them, though. That's why textbooks have exercises.

MIRI's academic work on alignment - to the extent they published anything at all - turned out to be almost comically irrelevant because they had no idea how AI actually works and their forecasts were almost totally wrong.

Yes. Amazingly, this fact alone makes them better than every other AI organization in existence (with the possible exception of Redwood Research and METR).

Should I post payment credentials to accept donations for my own AI organization? I promise to do even less to build the AI that takes over the world.

Coefficient Giving just launched a new funding project for AI Safety orgs. They are currently begging for applications. Shoot your shot.

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