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Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A maj

by raldi 2y ago

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A majority of its board seats are reserved for people who hold no equity whatsoever and whose explicit mandate is to look out for humanity. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentives/ https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentiv...

idiotsecant 2y ago
Put this and 'dont be evil' and 5 dollars in my hand and I'll give you a cup of coffee.
- nonchalantsui 2y ago
  Coffee for $5? That's a steal in this economy!
  - flurie 2y ago
    The coffee is made with the assistance of AI, which means some nonzero portion will be something other than coffee, but at least it means every sip is an adventure.
    - amarcheschi 2y ago
      This is one of the funniest takes on ai I've read, it could've been out of a videogame like the outer worlds with its absurd takes on crapitalism It's not the best choice, it's spacer's choice!
    - idiotsecant 2y ago
      Isn't there an SCP where occasionally it spits out liquid magma or strange matter or something?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Eextra953 2y ago
This is why I cancelled my chatgpt subscription and moved to claude. Its kinda silly, but I feel like the products are about equivalent for my use case so I'd rather do business with a company that is acting in good (better?) faith.
- mupuff1234 2y ago
  Don't think that's silly at all.
  - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
    Hope not - I haven't purchased a Nestle brand in years for this exact reason.
- rvnx 2y ago
  In the case they don't get high salaries from this activity, there is also a solution. The next step in ~10 years could be to offer their services to governments to offer "automated court decisions". Then the people who funded / trained this "justice" out of their good heart, would actually have leverage, in terms of concrete power. It's a much more subtle way to capture power, if you can replace the judges with your software.
  - UncleEntity 2y ago
    I guess they can get them to rewrite the US Constitution to remove that pesky "fair trial" bit and, since they would control the narrative, delete 1000+ years of common law. Brave new world, indeed...
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Anthropic pays their engineers pretty well. They're doing just fine, at least for as long as people are pouring money into their company. But that's everyone in this space, isn't it?
  - rafram 2y ago
    Thanks but no thanks.
mppm 2y ago
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but the practical upshot of this new "Public Benefit Corporation" thing, with or without a trust or non-profit attached, is that you can tell both the public and your investors to fuck off. The reason why all the big AI startups suddenly want to use it is because they can. Normally no sane investor would actually invest in such a structure, but right now the fear that you might be left out of the race for humanity's "last invention" is so acute that they do it anyway. But if Dario Amodei actually cared about humanity any more than Sam Altman, that would be the surprise of the year to me.
- raldi 2y ago
  Can you imagine a hypothetical AI company that did care about humanity, and if so, how would it look different from Anthropic?
  - caslon 2y ago
    It wouldn't be doing this: https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-and-Palantir-Partner-to-Bring-Claude-AI-Models-to-AWS-for-U.S.-Government-Intelligence-and-Defense-Operations/ https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a... It wouldn't specifically brag about doing it, while leaving out that they were specifically dealing with Palantir, because they know what they're doing is unethical: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-access-to-claude-for-government https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-access-to-claude-fo... Being available for use by militaries is incredibly irresponsible, regardless of what scope is specifically claimed, because of the inherent gravity of the situation when a military is wrong. The US military maintains a good deal of infrastructure in the US; putting into their hands an unreliable, incompetent calculator puts lives at risk. It would be structured as a non-profit (there are no teeth to a PBC; the structure is entirely to avoid liability, and if you have no trust in the executive body of an organization, it has zero meaningful signal). It would have a different leadership team. It would have a leader who could steelman his own position competently. Machines of Loving Grace was less redeeming than Lenat's old stump speeches for his position, despite Amodei starting up in an industry significantly more geared for what he had to say, and Lenat having an incredibly flexible sense of morality. Its leader would not have a history working for Chinese companies and jingoistically begin advocating for export controls. It would have different employees than the people I know who are working there, who have a history of picking the most unethical employers they can find, in a fashion not dissimilar to how Illumination Entertainment's "Minions" select employers.
manquer 2y ago
The attempt is commendable, but the agency problem is well understood and none of these alternative structures have really solve for it.
- esperent 2y ago
  > the agency problem is well understood What is "the agency problem"?
  - manquer 2y ago
    Very generally it is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... ) about the conflict of interest between agent( people taking action) and principal (the entity or person on behalf of whom action is taken) In modern management compensation theory (https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-economic-analysis/s20-agency-theory.html https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-economic... ) this is key to why executive compensation has increased much faster than workers in the last 50 years. Stock based compensation mix evolved from this thesis, and quite common in the valley and why almost all OpenAI staff wanted Sam Altman back even though the non profit board did not. Aligning key talent's compensation to enterprise value is only viable in unrestricted for profit entities any other structure with limits (capped profit, public benefit corporation, non profit, trust, 501c's etc) does not work as well. Talent will then leave to a for-profit entity who can offer better compensation than a restricted entity can because they share a % of their enterprise value which restricted ones either cannot or not have same liquidity/value [1] etc. --- [1]This is why public companies are more valuable for RSU/options than private companies, and why cash flow positive companies like Stripe still raise private money to just give liquidity to employees .

by raldi 2y ago

idiotsecant 2y ago

Put this and 'dont be evil' and 5 dollars in my hand and I'll give you a cup of coffee.

nonchalantsui 2y ago
Coffee for $5? That's a steal in this economy!
- flurie 2y ago
  The coffee is made with the assistance of AI, which means some nonzero portion will be something other than coffee, but at least it means every sip is an adventure.
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    This is one of the funniest takes on ai I've read, it could've been out of a videogame like the outer worlds with its absurd takes on crapitalism It's not the best choice, it's spacer's choice!
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    Isn't there an SCP where occasionally it spits out liquid magma or strange matter or something?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Eextra953 2y ago

This is why I cancelled my chatgpt subscription and moved to claude. Its kinda silly, but I feel like the products are about equivalent for my use case so I'd rather do business with a company that is acting in good (better?) faith.

mupuff1234 2y ago
Don't think that's silly at all.
- the_sleaze_ 2y ago
  Hope not - I haven't purchased a Nestle brand in years for this exact reason.
rvnx 2y ago
In the case they don't get high salaries from this activity, there is also a solution. The next step in ~10 years could be to offer their services to governments to offer "automated court decisions". Then the people who funded / trained this "justice" out of their good heart, would actually have leverage, in terms of concrete power. It's a much more subtle way to capture power, if you can replace the judges with your software.
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  I guess they can get them to rewrite the US Constitution to remove that pesky "fair trial" bit and, since they would control the narrative, delete 1000+ years of common law. Brave new world, indeed...
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Anthropic pays their engineers pretty well. They're doing just fine, at least for as long as people are pouring money into their company. But that's everyone in this space, isn't it?
- rafram 2y ago
  Thanks but no thanks.

mppm 2y ago

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but the practical upshot of this new "Public Benefit Corporation" thing, with or without a trust or non-profit attached, is that you can tell both the public and your investors to fuck off. The reason why all the big AI startups suddenly want to use it is because they can. Normally no sane investor would actually invest in such a structure, but right now the fear that you might be left out of the race for humanity's "last invention" is so acute that they do it anyway. But if Dario Amodei actually cared about humanity any more than Sam Altman, that would be the surprise of the year to me.

raldi 2y ago
Can you imagine a hypothetical AI company that did care about humanity, and if so, how would it look different from Anthropic?
- caslon 2y ago
  It wouldn't be doing this: https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-and-Palantir-Partner-to-Bring-Claude-AI-Models-to-AWS-for-U.S.-Government-Intelligence-and-Defense-Operations/ https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a... It wouldn't specifically brag about doing it, while leaving out that they were specifically dealing with Palantir, because they know what they're doing is unethical: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-access-to-claude-for-government https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-access-to-claude-fo... Being available for use by militaries is incredibly irresponsible, regardless of what scope is specifically claimed, because of the inherent gravity of the situation when a military is wrong. The US military maintains a good deal of infrastructure in the US; putting into their hands an unreliable, incompetent calculator puts lives at risk. It would be structured as a non-profit (there are no teeth to a PBC; the structure is entirely to avoid liability, and if you have no trust in the executive body of an organization, it has zero meaningful signal). It would have a different leadership team. It would have a leader who could steelman his own position competently. Machines of Loving Grace was less redeeming than Lenat's old stump speeches for his position, despite Amodei starting up in an industry significantly more geared for what he had to say, and Lenat having an incredibly flexible sense of morality. Its leader would not have a history working for Chinese companies and jingoistically begin advocating for export controls. It would have different employees than the people I know who are working there, who have a history of picking the most unethical employers they can find, in a fashion not dissimilar to how Illumination Entertainment's "Minions" select employers.

manquer 2y ago

The attempt is commendable, but the agency problem is well understood and none of these alternative structures have really solve for it.

esperent 2y ago
> the agency problem is well understood What is "the agency problem"?
- manquer 2y ago
  Very generally it is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... ) about the conflict of interest between agent( people taking action) and principal (the entity or person on behalf of whom action is taken) In modern management compensation theory (https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-economic-analysis/s20-agency-theory.html https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-economic... ) this is key to why executive compensation has increased much faster than workers in the last 50 years. Stock based compensation mix evolved from this thesis, and quite common in the valley and why almost all OpenAI staff wanted Sam Altman back even though the non profit board did not. Aligning key talent's compensation to enterprise value is only viable in unrestricted for profit entities any other structure with limits (capped profit, public benefit corporation, non profit, trust, 501c's etc) does not work as well. Talent will then leave to a for-profit entity who can offer better compensation than a restricted entity can because they share a % of their enterprise value which restricted ones either cannot or not have same liquidity/value [1] etc. --- [1]This is why public companies are more valuable for RSU/options than private companies, and why cash flow positive companies like Stripe still raise private money to just give liquidity to employees .