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So, it looks like Anthropic has finally gotten the backing to give OpenAI a serious run for their money when it comes to foundational models, via a Series C round of $450 million. There are a few core differences between their approach, and intelligent AI pundits seem to think that these could have dramatic impacts down the road on who gets to control the future of AI. My personal thoughts are still muddied - I'm not sure how much the technical side of things will matter in the age of hype and massive digital marketing. ChatGPT's first mover advantage may have already cemented them the crown of AI for the foreseeable future - unless of course they make a massive blunder.
What's most amusing to me in this whole situation is the way the landscape played out. Even though there were many firms hoping to advance the capabilities of AI, the two that are currently at the top originated as AI Safety outfits. Just like OpenAI, Anthropic sniped a lot of the top engineering talent pretending to care about safety,, then shamelessly pivoted to capabilities enhancement once they became "increasingly convinced that rapid AI progress will continue rather than stall or plateau."
While there are many condemnations and arguments over the AI Safety movement as a whole in the corner of the internet that cares, I think most people that discuss the future of AI don't take these signals strongly enough. The fact that the two largest, arguable most influential 'startup' orgs focused on AI Safety have already flipped to the other side, OpenAI having led the charge, should give anyone who believes in the Eliezer Yudkowsky doomer movement pause. If most people with power in that camp genuinely believed that doom was a given without a long period of AI restriction and alignment research, we should've seen massive departures and drama from OpenAI and Anthropic. The fact that their employees, stakeholders, and most of the AI ecosystem seems content to swallow their facile window-dressing as to why they've switched sides is proof to me that there's a massive lack of conviction in the AI Safety space.
Whatever happens, we're certainly in for an interesting few years. Whether AI continues to advance rapidly or stalls out, the world has already been changed at a level equivalent at least to the birth of the Internet. Now we're just waiting for the dominos to fall and the dust to settle.
Fingers crossed. With typical normalization of deviance this is how it happens, because eventually you push farther than is safe and that causes a spectacular disaster. But does that still hold when a disaster is an agent with obvious incentives to avoid spectacle? It could be that the first thing smart enough to cause a real disaster is also smart enough to hold back until the disaster would be irrecoverable.
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