8 ms·

> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are After 20 years of everyone in this industry saying "we w

by whstl 8mo ago

> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are After 20 years of everyone in this industry saying "we want to make the world a better place" and doing the opposite, the problem here is not really related to people's "understanding". And before the default answer kicks in: this is not cynicism. Plenty of folks here on HN and elsewhere legitimately believe that it's possible to do good with tech. But a billion dollar behemoth with great PR isn't that.

amunozo 8mo ago
I don't even think both things are contradictory. People that put too much value in their ideals tend to oversee the consequences of such ideals in real life and do wrong without deviating an inch from their ideals.
- plufz 8mo ago
  But is that really the problem in big tech today? To me it looks like sooner or later they cave from their ideals (or leadership changes) and that the reason every time is that they want to make even more money.
  - hsuduebc2 8mo ago
    I believe that this is classical behaviour of every share holder driven business. You can build on ideals from start, but once you acquire some position, money making is on the menu. Eg. deliberately worsening user experience for better revenue. Possiblity to turn on heated seats in car you own for a small monthly fee is absurd yet very real. I'm looking forward to enshittification of current AI tools.
    - Ajedi32 8mo ago
      Yeah it's not that the people involved have no ideals, it's that the company structure as a whole doesn't, and over time that structure will eventually outlive, corrupt, and/or overpower the ideals of the founders or other principled individuals at the company.
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    Sure, sooner or later. I don't want to even guess where the new AI companies are on the path that leads to that destination, but right now it looks like Anthropic is not at that stage. Heck, even though a lot of people find Sam Altman slimy, even OpenAI isn't yet at that stage.
  - moozooh 8mo ago
    Or, perhaps even more likely, the ideals inevitably get corrupted by access to unthinkable economic power/leverage, like it happened with more or less all other giants with strongly idealistic initial leadership and leadership may actually delude itself into thinking they're still on the right track as a sort of a defense mechanism. Back when they published the article on the Claude-operated mass-scale data breach last year, the conclusions were delivered in a bafflingly casual tone as if it was a weather report: yeah, the world has become a lot more dangerous now (on its own), so you may want to start using Claude for cyber-defense and we are doing our best to help you protect your business. I rolled my eyes at that so hard they popped out of their sockets. Weren't you... the guys... who made it that way and enabled that very attack? Very convenient to sell weapons to both sides, isn't it, not at all like a mafia business. Very responsible and ideal-driven. Consider also the part that is going unsaid in the address: Amodei is strongly against the use of Claude for mass surveillance of Americans but he says nothing about mass surveillance of anybody else (and, in fact, is proactively giving foreign intelligence a green light in his address) and is deliberately avoiding any discussion on the fact that his relationship with the Pentagon is mediated through the contract with Palantir they signed something like 1.5 years ago. Palantir is a company whose business is literally mass surveillance, by the way! I, too, am so ideal-driven that I willingly make deals with the devil! But now that he's successfully captured the popular sentiment, people are going to consider him the moral champion without bothering to look at these and other glaring contradictions.
    - detourdog 8mo ago
      Ideals have always been represented in literature as a virtue and a problem for humans. I find real life is no different.
  - Planktonne 8mo ago
    I think that's still too rosy a view; it's clear with a lot of big tech that they never had the ideals in the first place. They use claims of principle for marketing purposes and then discard them when it's no longer convenient.
- hsuduebc2 8mo ago
  I can’t think of a single thing Meta does that isn’t driven by pure greed.
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    Yes, though Meta is a bad example as they started off with the values of Zuckerberg, and still have them.
    - endofreach 8mo ago
      Exactly right. But i think it makes it a good example actually. Company DNA is a thing. Bill Gates isn't running microsoft anymore. Still...
    - hsuduebc2 8mo ago
      What would be more appropriate example?
      - ben_w 8mo ago
        Apple, Tesla, Oculus. The first two are definitely "heroes who lived long enough to be villains"; Oculus is more of an "I recon" due to how it was seen right up until getting bought by Facebook. Adobe?
        shafyy 8mo ago
        LOL, Palmer Luckey is a right-wing war mongering psychopath.
        hamasho 8mo ago
        But in the stock market, it is almost impossible for companies like Anthropic or any successful startups not to become villains (profit first no matter what). Anthropic especially needs to burn huge amount of money, so they need a lot of funding. The only way to keep founders' idealism is probably to copy Zuckerberg. Divide stocks with and without voting-power and trade only no-voting stocks.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
OtherShrezzing 8mo ago
I think most people are conscious that, irrespective of a founders vision, company morals usually don't survive the MBA-inisation phase of a company's growth.
- qdotme 8mo ago
  Depends. Many still reflect the founders vision; even if that vision might have evolved over time.
  - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
    Can you provide an example of that for an American venture backed corporation older than a decade?
    - achenet 8mo ago
      Not the person you're replying to, and I may be wrong about this, but Amazon? Jeff's original vision was "relentless customer focus" and ... actually on second thought I'm seeing the argument 'Amazon stopped caring about customers and is in full enshittification mode at this point'. But maybe Amazon circa ~2010/2015, or Google around 2010 was still pretty close to the original vision of customer service/organizing the world's information. Or Apple? They're still making nice computers, although not sure they count as VC backed. Stripe perhaps? Hashicorp?
      - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
        Well Google‘s vision was to catalog all the world’s data Apple wanted to make personal computing stable - they were absolutely VC backed I suppose the original question is vague enough that it could always encompass everything which is founders vision even if the vision changes so it’s like OK well then then there’s nothing really to say that you’re stable too it’s just some whatever the function of the person who started the organization is and even that you could debate
- whstl 8mo ago
dust42 8mo ago
Exactly. At this level you don't just put out a statement of your personal opinion. This is run through PR and coordinated with the investors. Otherwise the CEO finds himself on the street by tomorrow. Whatever their motives are, it is aligned with VC, because if it is not then the next day there is another CEO. As the parent stated, this is not cynicism. I see this just rather factual, it is simply the laws of money.
- qdotme 8mo ago
  FWIW, I don’t actually know if board of Anthropic has actual power to replace its CEO or if Dario has retained some form of personal super-control shares Zuckerberg style. At some level of growth, the dynamics between competent founders and shareholders flip. Even if the board could afford to replace a CEO, it might not be worth it.
  - dust42 8mo ago
    I'd counter that at this level of capital, if the CEO doesn't well align with the capital, then super-control shares will be overpowered by super-lawyers and if there is need some super-donations. OpenAI was a public interest company...
    - blackqueeriroh 8mo ago
      This is fundamentally incorrect.
    - qdotme 8mo ago
      Not at all. Especially at that level of capital. It’s the equity equivalent of „if you owe a bank a million dollars, you’re in trouble. If you owe a bank a billion dollars, the bank is in trouble”. Capital is extremely fungible. Typically extremely overleveraged. Lawyers are on the other hand extremely overprotective. They won’t generally risk the destruction of capital, even in slam-dunk cases. Vide WeWork.
  - nradov 8mo ago
    Anthropic has an odd voting structure. While the CEO Dario Amodei holds no super-voting shares, there are special shares controlled by a separate council of trustees who aren't answerable to investors and who have the power to replace the Board. So in practice it comes down to personal relationships.
wartywhoa23 8mo ago
Cynicism is the newspeak substitute for sincerity, no need to worry about being called a cynic in this post-truth world of snowflakes.
puppymaster 8mo ago
and that's okay. so we judge them one decision at a time. So far, Anthropic is good in my book.
Aperocky 8mo ago
Reminds me of Effective Altruism and the collective results of people claiming to believe in that virtue.
tyingq 8mo ago
I don't think it's cynical to acknowledge the pattern that publicly owned companies will eventually cave to the desires of their shareholders. I understand Anthropic is not public, but I assume there's an IPO coming.
mcv 8mo ago
Exactly. I'd love to believe that at Anthropic, idealism trumps money. But Google was once idealistic too. OpenAI was too. It's really hard to resist the pull of money. Especially if you're a for-profit corporation, but OpenAI wasn't even that at first.
vladms 8mo ago
> everyone in this industry So in the last 20 years there is nothing good coming out of the software industry (if this is the industry you mention) ? I find it somehow ironic, because this type of generalization is for me the same issue that some of the people saying "they want to make a better place" have: accept reality is complex. There were huge benefits for society from the software industry in the last 20 years. There were (as well!) huge downsides. Around 2000 lots of people were "Microsoft will lock us in forever". 20 years later, the fear "moved" to other things. Imagining that companies can last forever seems misguided. IBM, Intel, Nokia and others were once great and the only ones but ultimately got copied and pushed from the spotlight.
- whstl 8mo ago
  Everyone in this industry making a certain bullshit claim. I did qualify my statement. Don’t cut my words to make a strawman. Additionally I state in the end that I do believe it’s possible.
  - vladms 8mo ago
    So do you know everyone in the industry that made that such a claim? Sure, maybe you meant to restrict it further to "everyone I have noticed personally that said/wrote that" (or anything along the lines), but even then, do you know all the stuff that they did after saying it? (as the statement also included "doing the opposite" which I find quite strong). If I see "everyone" I would expect it to actually mean "everyone under the constraints", the word "everyone" has a certain meaning and is very powerful, why use for situations where other words like "many", "most" might be more appropriate?
    - whstl 8mo ago
      > So do you know everyone in the industry that made that such a claim Of course, I wouldn't have said so otherwise. Here's another one: every pedant in this website never adds anything useful to any conversation.
lebovic 8mo ago
I don't think it's cynical to believe that a company can make the world a worse place, or that Anthropic as a company will make many horrible choices. I do think it's cynical to believe that people, and groups of people, can't be motivated by more than money.
personjerry 8mo ago
At some point I've wondered if "fiduciary duty", when pushed to highest corporate levels, always conflicts with "make the world a better place" i.e. Fiduciary Duty Considered Harmful
5o1ecist 8mo ago
[flagged]
jug 8mo ago
This is a component for sure, but also think of why Anthropic was born. It exists because of disagreements with OpenAI on the values of AI safety and principles.
tristor 8mo ago
> Plenty of folks here on HN and elsewhere legitimately believe that it's possible to do good with tech. But a billion dollar behemoth with great PR isn't that. To expand on that a bit, many of us (myself included) fully believe founders set out with lofty and good goals when organizations are small. Scale is power, and power corrupts. It's as simple as that. It's an exceptionally rare quality to resist that corruption, and everyone has a breaking point. We understand humans because we are humans, and we understand that large organizations, especially corporations, are fundamentally incapable of acting morally (in fact corporations are inherently amoral).
- whstl 8mo ago
  Yep, exactly. That's the gist of it. Scale is also what's killing jobs, ruining human relationships, fucking up societies. Et cetera.

by whstl 8mo ago

amunozo 8mo ago

I don't even think both things are contradictory. People that put too much value in their ideals tend to oversee the consequences of such ideals in real life and do wrong without deviating an inch from their ideals.

plufz 8mo ago
But is that really the problem in big tech today? To me it looks like sooner or later they cave from their ideals (or leadership changes) and that the reason every time is that they want to make even more money.
- hsuduebc2 8mo ago
  I believe that this is classical behaviour of every share holder driven business. You can build on ideals from start, but once you acquire some position, money making is on the menu. Eg. deliberately worsening user experience for better revenue. Possiblity to turn on heated seats in car you own for a small monthly fee is absurd yet very real. I'm looking forward to enshittification of current AI tools.
  - Ajedi32 8mo ago
    Yeah it's not that the people involved have no ideals, it's that the company structure as a whole doesn't, and over time that structure will eventually outlive, corrupt, and/or overpower the ideals of the founders or other principled individuals at the company.
- ben_w 8mo ago
  Sure, sooner or later. I don't want to even guess where the new AI companies are on the path that leads to that destination, but right now it looks like Anthropic is not at that stage. Heck, even though a lot of people find Sam Altman slimy, even OpenAI isn't yet at that stage.
- moozooh 8mo ago
  Or, perhaps even more likely, the ideals inevitably get corrupted by access to unthinkable economic power/leverage, like it happened with more or less all other giants with strongly idealistic initial leadership and leadership may actually delude itself into thinking they're still on the right track as a sort of a defense mechanism. Back when they published the article on the Claude-operated mass-scale data breach last year, the conclusions were delivered in a bafflingly casual tone as if it was a weather report: yeah, the world has become a lot more dangerous now (on its own), so you may want to start using Claude for cyber-defense and we are doing our best to help you protect your business. I rolled my eyes at that so hard they popped out of their sockets. Weren't you... the guys... who made it that way and enabled that very attack? Very convenient to sell weapons to both sides, isn't it, not at all like a mafia business. Very responsible and ideal-driven. Consider also the part that is going unsaid in the address: Amodei is strongly against the use of Claude for mass surveillance of Americans but he says nothing about mass surveillance of anybody else (and, in fact, is proactively giving foreign intelligence a green light in his address) and is deliberately avoiding any discussion on the fact that his relationship with the Pentagon is mediated through the contract with Palantir they signed something like 1.5 years ago. Palantir is a company whose business is literally mass surveillance, by the way! I, too, am so ideal-driven that I willingly make deals with the devil! But now that he's successfully captured the popular sentiment, people are going to consider him the moral champion without bothering to look at these and other glaring contradictions.
  - detourdog 8mo ago
    Ideals have always been represented in literature as a virtue and a problem for humans. I find real life is no different.
- Planktonne 8mo ago
  I think that's still too rosy a view; it's clear with a lot of big tech that they never had the ideals in the first place. They use claims of principle for marketing purposes and then discard them when it's no longer convenient.
hsuduebc2 8mo ago
I can’t think of a single thing Meta does that isn’t driven by pure greed.
- ben_w 8mo ago
  Yes, though Meta is a bad example as they started off with the values of Zuckerberg, and still have them.
  - endofreach 8mo ago
    Exactly right. But i think it makes it a good example actually. Company DNA is a thing. Bill Gates isn't running microsoft anymore. Still...
  - hsuduebc2 8mo ago
    What would be more appropriate example?
    - ben_w 8mo ago
      Apple, Tesla, Oculus. The first two are definitely "heroes who lived long enough to be villains"; Oculus is more of an "I recon" due to how it was seen right up until getting bought by Facebook. Adobe?
      - shafyy 8mo ago
        LOL, Palmer Luckey is a right-wing war mongering psychopath.
      - hamasho 8mo ago
        But in the stock market, it is almost impossible for companies like Anthropic or any successful startups not to become villains (profit first no matter what). Anthropic especially needs to burn huge amount of money, so they need a lot of funding. The only way to keep founders' idealism is probably to copy Zuckerberg. Divide stocks with and without voting-power and trade only no-voting stocks.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

OtherShrezzing 8mo ago

I think most people are conscious that, irrespective of a founders vision, company morals usually don't survive the MBA-inisation phase of a company's growth.

qdotme 8mo ago
Depends. Many still reflect the founders vision; even if that vision might have evolved over time.
- AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
  Can you provide an example of that for an American venture backed corporation older than a decade?
  - achenet 8mo ago
    Not the person you're replying to, and I may be wrong about this, but Amazon? Jeff's original vision was "relentless customer focus" and ... actually on second thought I'm seeing the argument 'Amazon stopped caring about customers and is in full enshittification mode at this point'. But maybe Amazon circa ~2010/2015, or Google around 2010 was still pretty close to the original vision of customer service/organizing the world's information. Or Apple? They're still making nice computers, although not sure they count as VC backed. Stripe perhaps? Hashicorp?
    - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
      Well Google‘s vision was to catalog all the world’s data Apple wanted to make personal computing stable - they were absolutely VC backed I suppose the original question is vague enough that it could always encompass everything which is founders vision even if the vision changes so it’s like OK well then then there’s nothing really to say that you’re stable too it’s just some whatever the function of the person who started the organization is and even that you could debate
whstl 8mo ago

dust42 8mo ago

Exactly. At this level you don't just put out a statement of your personal opinion. This is run through PR and coordinated with the investors. Otherwise the CEO finds himself on the street by tomorrow. Whatever their motives are, it is aligned with VC, because if it is not then the next day there is another CEO. As the parent stated, this is not cynicism. I see this just rather factual, it is simply the laws of money.

qdotme 8mo ago
FWIW, I don’t actually know if board of Anthropic has actual power to replace its CEO or if Dario has retained some form of personal super-control shares Zuckerberg style. At some level of growth, the dynamics between competent founders and shareholders flip. Even if the board could afford to replace a CEO, it might not be worth it.
- dust42 8mo ago
  I'd counter that at this level of capital, if the CEO doesn't well align with the capital, then super-control shares will be overpowered by super-lawyers and if there is need some super-donations. OpenAI was a public interest company...
  - blackqueeriroh 8mo ago
    This is fundamentally incorrect.
  - qdotme 8mo ago
    Not at all. Especially at that level of capital. It’s the equity equivalent of „if you owe a bank a million dollars, you’re in trouble. If you owe a bank a billion dollars, the bank is in trouble”. Capital is extremely fungible. Typically extremely overleveraged. Lawyers are on the other hand extremely overprotective. They won’t generally risk the destruction of capital, even in slam-dunk cases. Vide WeWork.
- nradov 8mo ago
  Anthropic has an odd voting structure. While the CEO Dario Amodei holds no super-voting shares, there are special shares controlled by a separate council of trustees who aren't answerable to investors and who have the power to replace the Board. So in practice it comes down to personal relationships.

wartywhoa23 8mo ago

Cynicism is the newspeak substitute for sincerity, no need to worry about being called a cynic in this post-truth world of snowflakes.

puppymaster 8mo ago

and that's okay. so we judge them one decision at a time. So far, Anthropic is good in my book.

Aperocky 8mo ago

Reminds me of Effective Altruism and the collective results of people claiming to believe in that virtue.

tyingq 8mo ago

I don't think it's cynical to acknowledge the pattern that publicly owned companies will eventually cave to the desires of their shareholders. I understand Anthropic is not public, but I assume there's an IPO coming.

mcv 8mo ago

Exactly. I'd love to believe that at Anthropic, idealism trumps money. But Google was once idealistic too. OpenAI was too. It's really hard to resist the pull of money. Especially if you're a for-profit corporation, but OpenAI wasn't even that at first.

vladms 8mo ago

> everyone in this industry So in the last 20 years there is nothing good coming out of the software industry (if this is the industry you mention) ? I find it somehow ironic, because this type of generalization is for me the same issue that some of the people saying "they want to make a better place" have: accept reality is complex. There were huge benefits for society from the software industry in the last 20 years. There were (as well!) huge downsides. Around 2000 lots of people were "Microsoft will lock us in forever". 20 years later, the fear "moved" to other things. Imagining that companies can last forever seems misguided. IBM, Intel, Nokia and others were once great and the only ones but ultimately got copied and pushed from the spotlight.

whstl 8mo ago
Everyone in this industry making a certain bullshit claim. I did qualify my statement. Don’t cut my words to make a strawman. Additionally I state in the end that I do believe it’s possible.
- vladms 8mo ago
  So do you know everyone in the industry that made that such a claim? Sure, maybe you meant to restrict it further to "everyone I have noticed personally that said/wrote that" (or anything along the lines), but even then, do you know all the stuff that they did after saying it? (as the statement also included "doing the opposite" which I find quite strong). If I see "everyone" I would expect it to actually mean "everyone under the constraints", the word "everyone" has a certain meaning and is very powerful, why use for situations where other words like "many", "most" might be more appropriate?
  - whstl 8mo ago
    > So do you know everyone in the industry that made that such a claim Of course, I wouldn't have said so otherwise. Here's another one: every pedant in this website never adds anything useful to any conversation.

lebovic 8mo ago

I don't think it's cynical to believe that a company can make the world a worse place, or that Anthropic as a company will make many horrible choices. I do think it's cynical to believe that people, and groups of people, can't be motivated by more than money.

personjerry 8mo ago

At some point I've wondered if "fiduciary duty", when pushed to highest corporate levels, always conflicts with "make the world a better place" i.e. Fiduciary Duty Considered Harmful

5o1ecist 8mo ago

[flagged]

jug 8mo ago

This is a component for sure, but also think of why Anthropic was born. It exists because of disagreements with OpenAI on the values of AI safety and principles.

tristor 8mo ago

> Plenty of folks here on HN and elsewhere legitimately believe that it's possible to do good with tech. But a billion dollar behemoth with great PR isn't that. To expand on that a bit, many of us (myself included) fully believe founders set out with lofty and good goals when organizations are small. Scale is power, and power corrupts. It's as simple as that. It's an exceptionally rare quality to resist that corruption, and everyone has a breaking point. We understand humans because we are humans, and we understand that large organizations, especially corporations, are fundamentally incapable of acting morally (in fact corporations are inherently amoral).

whstl 8mo ago
Yep, exactly. That's the gist of it. Scale is also what's killing jobs, ruining human relationships, fucking up societies. Et cetera.