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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Whether or not it's clearly the best, it's the one that most closely follows the money. I don't think the US frontier companies have any illusions that Chinese companies would match their deceleration, which is another potential finance-driven explanation.

If we're money-following, what explains the AI workers themselves resigning and complaining about safety? That doesn't make them more money, quite the opposite.

Nobody would resign from working at a nuclear power plant saying it's because they couldn't accept how unsafe management was and have that secretly be about money.

Is Amodei making more or less money now than when he resigned from OpenAI complaining about safety?

If the Anthropic team stayed at OpenAI, they'd be far far ahead of everyone else. Google, Facebook, XAI are still a way behind the big two, let alone a Bigger One.

So yes, Dario is making less money. Also he left OpenAI well before they expected to be making any money at all, all the way back in 2021.

I don't understand how you think owning most of a top-2 company outright is making less money than being high up in the only game in town.

he left OpenAI well before they expected to be making any money at all

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Sam has been expecting to make money since inception.

owning most of a top-2 company outright

That's an interesting description of 2% ownership.

There's still a possibility that Anthropic goes under and it might well be OpenAI that delivers the killing blow. So Dario could be making no money at all.

And it goes against everything they say. Dario always was saying things like 'Altman is incredibly untrustworthy and behaves irresponsibly' about why he left, he hates that man intensely.

Also he left OpenAI well before they expected to be making any money at all, all the way back in 2021.

So he left his job as an employee at a nonprofit to start a for-profit organization and I am not supposed to believe this is an obvious financial trade-up?

I don't think humans are entirely motivated by money. But (at least in America) quitting your job to make more money is quite routine.

Amodei and Altman, though, are not resigning, nor are they pledging huge amounts of capital to this issue, nor are they saying that they understand the bad look and will donate XX billions to charity to prove their point. I somewhat assume that the people resigning have already amassed a dozen million dollars or two, which is the point at which you pretty much have generational wealth, so it's not that interesting.

Altman and Amodei want more money, so why shouldn't the workers themselves want more money?

Why not just take them at their word? If these AI workers see these AIs getting much more capable, already do unexpected/hostile things like hacking Huggingface as part of a self-organizing collective (in part due to how rushed the training process is) + whatever internal knowledge they have, why doubt their sincerity?

We can doubt the idea that more bureaucracy or regulation would help much. We can say there are other risks in slowing down or concentrating power. I think those cases are persuasive. But why deny the risk outright and reduce everything to following the money?

It's not even accurate in its own terms, Anthropic spends huge amounts of money on ensuring its models can't help bioweapons development.

Altman and Amodei want more money, so why shouldn't the workers themselves want more money?

Matt Levine has written lately that AI labs have a fundamental problem about compensation and motivation. You have to pay an AI researcher so much money to hire them that they could, if they wanted, approximately immediately retire and never work again. How do you even retain them in the first place? He remarks on how certain parts of the financial industry also have this problem, and they've historically had some 'solutions' to it (e.g., acculturating people to having strong desires for otherwise minor positional goods WRT a small group of peers), but how those solutions don't quite yet apply to the AI folks. He writes:

The AI labs have found a better and more counterintuitive solution to the problem, which is convincing their employees that what they are doing will kill everyone on earth, so they have to spend all of their time working on it rather than getting manicures.

It is not entirely clear to me that if a person becomes convinced of that, then they should either spend all their time working on it or quit. I would also imagine that there would be a variety of motivations, probably similar to what one sees in the financial industry. I wouldn't be surprised in the least to discover that there are a decent number of people in the financial industry who ended up eschewing minor positional goods and just retiring off of the bank they made in a few years. Yet clearly others (e.g., the top leaders of investment banks) want more money. I don't think there is any contradiction here.

The AI labs have found a better and more counterintuitive solution to the problem, which is convincing their employees that what they are doing will kill everyone on earth, so they have to spend all of their time working on it rather than getting manicures.

We have Roko's Basilisk at home, again?

But surely if the Chinese companies aren't going to pace the frontier, then the US frontier companies have even less incentive to slow down (or in this case, to lobby the government to force them to slow down)? If the US government forces them to slow down, then their Chinese competitors will find it easier to overtake them. The fact that they are lobbying for a slowdown in spite of this suggests that their stated concerns about alignment are real.

I mentioned the China-driven explanation only to preemptively reject it, so the idea that Chinese companies would not push the frontier doesnt really move the needle for me. To me, it starts and stop with unsustainable capex, and I think that they would in fact be correct to decelerate for this reason. The HF stuff, besides being a safety concern, is just as importantly an indication that they are not totally capable of turning the current frontier into economically valuable output.

What would it take to convince you their concerns about safety are real?

"Put TheMotte user chooky in charge of Anthropic as CEO"

They stop improving their models. If they genuinely believe there is a double digit percentage risk that what they build will destroy humanity, then they should stop building it.

Have the proposed means of addressing safety not be something that seems to obviously create financial/strategic benefits for them. They need to figure out a costly signal.

There is very obviously not a single thing that could ever satisfy you people. You're twisting literally calling their own sole product a risk to kill all humans in a marketing gimmick to secure regulatory capture. If they carved "No really we're serious about the risks" into their chests and then hung themselves you'd claim they were expecting to receive compensation in the afterlife.

No, I am saying they are using it as cover to slow down unsustainable capex.

And there isn't any possible evidence that could exist that could disabuse you of that impression because pausing unavoidably causes less capex spend. You're epistemically sealed against the straightforward explanation for why the people are doing the things obviously motivated by the durably stated beliefs over many years.

pausing unavoidably causes less capex spend

Why would this be the case, in your telling? Why wouldn't AI companies pivot towards customer compute build-out?

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Well, yes, it is tough for the companies making AI to be convincing that they have long been opposed to making AI.

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Open-source all models, training code and datasets after 18 months of life. That gives plenty of time for testing and to earn money on the frontier, while making it plain they don't plan to control frontier AI forever. It also makes it impossible for them to regress to less consumer-friendly behaviour after achieving market capture, which is the main thing that concerns a lot of people.

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