9 ms·

I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

179 points by emschwartz 7mo ago

wrs 7mo ago
> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan...? The part of the Pentagon that did this is, to put it politely, not the part that's good at planning.
ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
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- 15155 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- armitron 7mo ago
  Dwarkesh is your run-of-the-mill vapid influencer idiot. Fridman on the other hand, when in the presence of greatness, knows to STFU and listen.
  - Upvoter33 7mo ago
    “The presence of greatness” - ugh.
  - throwa356262 7mo ago
    I have been told the Fridmans association with MIT is mostly a lie. Not sure if this is true, maybe someone who went to MIT around the same time can shed some light on this?
    - kleebeesh 7mo ago
      I'm a random dude on the Internet, but my partner completed her PhD at MIT. While there I knew and knew of a few PhD grads who worked at MIT in some non-tenure-track role (postdoc, staff researcher, etc). Typically for a couple years and then they get a better-paying or more permanent job. But several remained "affiliated" in some way. They kept their MIT website/email, some in academia continued to collaborate to some extent. Things like that. But AFAIK they weren't getting a paycheck from MIT. And it's somewhere between neat and genuinely professionally valuable to be affiliated w/ a prestigious university, so I don't blame them for claiming affiliation. My best guess is he's "affiliated" in a similar way.
  - ademeure 7mo ago
    There's definitely something to be said for giving interesting people a platform to express their views unconditionally. Unfortunately, that can also be a very dangerous thing. I have been less and less impressed over the years with Lex's approach here. I'm personally very glad that Dwarkesh isn't like that. He's not perfect, but I think he's doing a way better job than other podcasters in the field right now.
  - lovich 7mo ago
    His Zelensky interview suggests otherwise
    - ed_balls 7mo ago
      It's interesting that's the only interview when he challenged someone.
      - ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
        That's quite incredible. I had noticed that Fridman never challenges anybody. As a separate point, I never watched his interview with Zelensky because I read a headline somewhere about that interview that made me sick. I guess he did challenge somebody finally. Disgusting.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- scoopdewoop 7mo ago
  Dwarkesh was ready to whitewash Elon the day after his Epstein emails came out. None of them should be taken seriously.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
    Link please!
    - scoopdewoop 7mo ago
      The day after the emails came out he posted a video where they had beers while Elon LARPed as a human
      - ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
        Link please!
        naves 7mo ago
        Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA
        ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
        Thanks for the link because I can't stomach 3 hours of this. First phrase: "you're saving on energy by putting data centers in space". What? 2:08 "It's harder to scale on the ground than it is in space" what?
        JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
        The argument is permitting and weather proofing are harder than lifting at certain values of scale for each. We’re not there right now. But if Starship pans out we’re at least damn close, particularly if solar-panel fabrication can be done from out-of-well silicates.
- ed_balls 7mo ago
  Dwarkesh is even more astroturfed than Lex Fridman. The interviews they do are just ads. No challenges, no hard questions. All seem staged and prepared.
Imnimo 7mo ago
>What we’re learning from this episode is that the government actually has way more leverage over private companies than we realized. Who is learning this for the first time only now? Even just restricting ourselves to the current administration, look at how many times Trump has directed punitive actions against private entities! Look at his actions against law firms like Perkins Coie or Covington & Burling. This is not something that just arose out of nowhere with Anthropic.
- guessmyname 7mo ago
  > Who is learning this for the first time only now? A teenager, probably. Not everyone is 100 years old.
- synalx 7mo ago
  This stood out to me too - there's an underlying assumption that private entities _can_ say no to governments, but that's only true to a point. If the government decides it needs AI-powered killbots as a matter of national security, it can and will nationalize whatever entities it needs to build them.
zer00eyz 7mo ago
> But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs. I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The whole open AI -> Anthropic saga just reeks of the same evolution of Viant/Scient. Look we have an amazing tool, but it has some fundamental shortcomings that the industry seems to want to burry its head in the sand about. The moment the hype dies and we get to engineering and practical implementations a lot is going to change. Does it have the potential to displace a lot of our current industry: why yes it does. Agents can force the web open (have you ever tried to get all your amazon purchase history?) can kill dark patterns (go cancel this service for me), and crush wedge services (how many things are shimmed into sales force that should really be stand alone apps). And the valuable engagement is going to be by PEOPLE, good UI, good user experiences are gonna be what sells (this will hit internet advertising hard for the middle men like google and Facebook).
- ekidd 7mo ago
  > I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The notion that 99% of the workforce and military will be AIs isn't "copium", it's grounds for absolute terror. One of two things will be true: 1. The AIs will be controlled by the Epstein class, who will then have no use for most of humanity, either as workers or soldiers. 2. Or the AIs will be controlled by the AIs themselves, which also seems worrisome. Really, any situation where 99% of the workforce and military are AIs should be deeply concerning, for reasons that should be obvious to any student of history or evolution. And, sure, maybe we won't get there in our lifetimes. But if we did, I wouldn't expect an automatic utopia.
  - fn-mote 7mo ago
    The GP does not believe that AI is going to end up running 99% of everything. Ever. The GP is saying that it’s a major over-extrapolation of the current progress. You seem to be assuming we will get there instead of expecting the cracks will become more and more obvious.
- ceroxylon 7mo ago
  I think a lot of Dwarkesh's mentality about AI being inevitable / ubiquitous comes from the same part of him that thinks that artificial things are "good enough", e.g. the way he allows his production team to use fake plastic plants on set. Is he correct? I'm not sure, but I know there are at least a few people who notice the difference.
epgui 7mo ago
I really hate how people think LLMs == AI. An LLM can’t/shouldn’t be doing anything other than generating text.
- Trasmatta 7mo ago
  This is pedantic. AI has many definitions. There was "AI" powering enemies in 80s and 90s video games
- guessmyname 7mo ago
  I’m also as pedantic as you and use “LLM” even talking about these systems but you need to be flexible and accept that “AI” is already in everyone’s head when referring to GPT variants.
- rishabhaiover 7mo ago
  How is this related to the current discussion at hand?
- varenc 7mo ago
  LLMs are AI. Markov text generators from the 1970s/80s are AI. Face recognition software like FaceID is AI. Many people behind LLMs got degrees under departments that have AI in their title. AI is just computers doing things we typically associate with human intelligence, and having a conversation with a computer that effectively passes the Turing test, is definitely AI. If LLMs aren't AI, then AI isn't a useful term. (though agreed that LLMs aren't AGI, which I assume is what you're thinking of) Wikipedia's list of AI applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Applic...
  - api 7mo ago
    This is called the AI effect: we stop calling it AI when it works. Its goal post moving to keep the sci-fi term sci-fi. There’s a similar thing with transhumanist “enhancement” or “life extension” stuff. When it actually works we call it medicine. Statistically one of the most powerful life extension techs ever developed was the cardiac bypass, which would have been sci-fi in 1900. I’ve been using stuff like Claude Code and personally feel comfortable calling this stuff AI. Is it AGI? I don’t think so, but then again I’m not totally sure what that is. Am I AGI? I’m not universally able to handle all forms of cognition well and I can’t self modify much, so I’m not sure either. I’m not even sure if AGI is a well formed concept. Intelligence is a pretty broad concept too. My pet rabbit is intelligent. Plants are intelligent. Bacteria are intelligent. Anything that can run an OODA loop, learn, adapt, and move toward a goal function is intelligent. By that definition some computer systems have been AI for decades. They’re just getting better. I think there’s intelligence all around us. We just don’t get the wow factor from it unless it talks.
bikesharing 7mo ago
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julius_eth_dev 7mo ago
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- armchairhacker 7mo ago
  AI slop > The uncomfortable truth is that... > ...that the real question isn't... > Corporate resistance...introduces friction at the infrastructure layer And check comment history (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=julius_eth_dev https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=julius_eth_dev) Sometime yesterday, or further back, someone has decided to run a bot experiment (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patchnull https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patchnull, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079)
  - dyauspitr 7mo ago
    I mean almost certainly but what do the sentences you’ve highlighted have to do with that.
    - armchairhacker 7mo ago
      They're AI tells. No human would write about how "corporate friction" "introduces friction at the infrastructure layer", except maybe someone who's trying to use big words to sound smart, because it barely makes sense (what "friction"? "Infrastructure layer", what are the other layers?)
      - awesome_dude 7mo ago
        AI didn't invent the terms, they were a part of the training data given to it. The real tell is that you've not been in the group of people that use these terms frequently enough for you to think they're normal. It's like the emdash alarmism, AI never invented emdash, nor did it invent using it frequently. Its training was full of examples, so many that AI picked up using it frequently.
        7mo ago
alecco 7mo ago
But the "Anthropic fight" is mostly fake. Palantir was using Claude as base model. Anthropic allegedly took issue with unsupervised kills because the technology wasn't ready (or something along the lines). Also, I remember reading this guy has close ties to Anthropic. Also, I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere. Like Big Tech and the establishment are propping podcasts of controlled narrative/opposition. I don't buy any of it.
- Readerium 7mo ago
  Yes he is room-mates with.
  - cushychicken 7mo ago
    Love the interviews Dwarkesh sponsored with Sarah Paine from the Naval War College. Also, somewhat spitefully, find it funny that he has multiple roommates.
    - alecco 7mo ago
      Those ones were a bit on the nose, no?
      - _diyar 7mo ago
        How so? I enjoyed them, keeping in mind that the lecturer was a professor at a US naval war college.
        alecco 7mo ago
        Would you like to know MORE?
        randallsquared 7mo ago
        You are pattern matching to something that doesn't really fit, I think.
dwoldrich 7mo ago
Private AI's and searchable personal data troves are the only way to go if you care about privacy. I speculate we'll discover there's very few unambiguously ethical uses of AI, much less for military applications. Them's the breaks.
SilverElfin 7mo ago
But this isn’t a fight about Anthropic, or mass surveillance, or even AI. This is a fight about lawfare, constitutional rights, and corruption. The lawfare part of it is that to coerce an individual or a company, governments are willing to abuse their power. The Biden administration did it when pressuring social media companies to censor content. The Trump administration is doing it to a much greater extent with things like ordering every government agency to stop using Anthropic and by labeling them a supply chain risk. The ideological part of it is when Defense Sec Hegseth and Trump and AI Czar / PayPal Mafia member David Sacks repeatedly attack Anthropic as “woke”, and it is clear they’re undermining this company from their government positions based on Anthropic’s speech (first amendment violation). This obviously is part of why they attacked Anthropic in such a public way. And the corruption part of it is OpenAI’s leaders being big supporters of the MAGA movement and the Trump administration. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, is the biggest donor ever to the MAGA PAC. Why did Hegseth grant a contract to OpenAI after banning Anthropic, even though OpenAI has the same red lines in their agreement (what Sam Altman claimed)? It’s because of the corruption - give Trump and his family/friends money, and you’ll get something back. The fight against these types of government abuse have ALWAYS been happening. But the abuse is much more in the open today, and much larger in scale than ever before. Scandals like Watergate would not even make the news today. And that is what the public should be waking up to and focusing on. We need to rethink our political system significantly and add a lot more protections against the kind of things the Trump 2.0 administration has done.
telotortium 7mo ago
One thing I’ve never heard a good answer to: If Anthropic is a supplier not to the Department of Defense itself, but to Palantir, why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation (assuming the government’s concerns with Anthropic having authority over military missions is valid)? As for whether code written with Claude Code should be so considered - if it’s just code that is subject to human review, I would argue that this use shouldn’t be a supply chain risk. But with Claude Code PR Review and similar products, the chance that an AI product (not limiting to Anthropic here) could own a load-bearing part of the lifecycle of a critical piece of code becomes much larger, and deserves scrutiny.
- xvector 7mo ago
  > why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation Because you can't designate a company a SCR because you don't like the contract you signed with them.
  - telotortium 7mo ago
    But the DoD signed a contract with Palantir.
    - travismark 7mo ago
      to which Anthropic was a subcontractor. government agrees to the entire contract, including the subs
  - fluidcruft 7mo ago
    This admin technically can't do a lot of the things it does. They do it anyway with utter contempt for the rule of law. Congress is useless and gives them a blank check and the Supreme Court just stalls everything using the shadow docket.
- HarHarVeryFunny 7mo ago
  I'm not sure that "supply chain risk" is even the right term to be discussing. What Hegseth/Trump want to do is not just stop Anthropic models from being used by any military supplier pursuant to goods/services they are providing to the military, but rather say that if you do business with the military then you must not use Anthropic at all, even if that usage is entirely unrelated to your military contracts.
ang_cire 7mo ago
The author is naive. > The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves. We don’t want the winner of the AI race to be a government which operates on the principle that there is no such thing as a truly private company or a private citizen. In the US currently, there are private citizens, and there are 'not-the-1%' citizens, where a Kavanaugh stop is legal, your voter information may be (or may have already been) seized by the DoJ or FBI, you may be tracked by out of state or federal agents on ALPRs with no warrant, for any reason, and where attending a legal protest may have your biometrics added to a database of potential domestic terrorists. Or maybe your tax money will just be used to blow up unidentified boaters or bomb girls' schools and homes, and you'll get no say in whether that's the case because the elected body that is there to issue a declaration of war (or not) as representatives of you, has abdicated that power to a cabinet of unelected white nationalists. But go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness Better than China as a global model? Still, yes, probably. Potentially. Depends on how the next few years ago. Even if America fails, I’d argue a global republic is a brighter potential future than a global dictatorship.
  - propagandist 7mo ago
    As much a republic as Rome was under Caligula.
  - BoredPositron 7mo ago
    A republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore.
    - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
      > republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore An observation one can make when comparing a republic with the rule of law to one that ain’t, whether across time or geography. There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.
abcde666777 7mo ago
"Within 20 years 99% of the military will be AIs" That smells like such a baseless speculation that from the get go I'm not convinced of the author's rigor.
- empath75 7mo ago
  It’s also just a category error. It’s like saying that 99% of farm workers are tractors or 99% of textile workers are looms.
  - dcre 7mo ago
    Do you not think a change in knowledge work similar in scale to the industrialization of agriculture would be significant?
    - simgt 7mo ago
      Why are you trying to change the meaning of their comment?
      - dcre 7mo ago
        They are changing the meaning of the original text. It does not say “workers.”
        empath75 7mo ago
        It says "workforce": workforce (noun): the _people_ engaged in or available for work, either in a country or area or in a particular company or industry. Machinery is not part of the "workforce".
  - aspenmayer 7mo ago
    To be fair, we don’t have many government mules these days, but it wasn’t always so, and not so long ago. The current amount of horsepower on the hoof is a rounding error, but before mechanized farming and war-fighting, these distinctions were the difference. If we consider the capacity of technology to act as a force multiplier, it is reasonable to assume that current and future AI-assisted fighting forces can achieve more with less traditional materiel and with fewer personnel. Drones are an especially likely way that these many AIs will become embodied and diversify, in which case I don’t think the percentages are so far-fetched. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62662gzlp8o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62662gzlp8o > Further ahead in the future, it wants its machines to be programmed to travel autonomously to a location, carry out its task - such as watching out for advancing enemy soldiers and engaging them if necessary - and then return to base after a certain time.
keybored 7mo ago
> [99% AI soon]... > Our future civilization will run on AI labor. And as much as the government’s actions here piss me off, in a way I’m glad this episode happened - because it gives us the opportunity to think through some extremely important questions about who this future workforce will be accountable and aligned to, and who gets to determine that. I stopped reading there because this is a pointless exercise.[1] This isn’t a roundtable. You are not even at the table. There isn’t some “thankfully time to discuss this...”—you are just out. The Machine doesn’t need your labor? You are out. No norms. No discussions. You either try to forcefully take control of the situation or you see yourself get discarded. (I am here just assuming all the AI Maximalist (doom maximalist in this context, Trump and all) premises for the sake of the argument.) [1] I did read the last paragraphs and the tenor is the same. “We must make laws and norms through our political system”… just like with nuclear bombs, of all things.
andyferris 7mo ago
> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan — to coerce and threaten to destroy every single company that won’t give them what they want on exactly their terms? I mean... isn't that pretty much the way the current administration behaves in general? If the answer to this question is "yes", and the US executive does not in fact share the values of the author about free and open society, then the rest of the article is kinda moot (except the point that we should be talking about these things now, and encouraging congress to act).
- kelseyfrog 7mo ago
  The administration believes that rights, in this case the right of corporate existence, are granted by the state. This is opposed to the liberal conception that rights are a product of natural existence - an essential feature of being.
  - kelnos 7mo ago
    The right of corporate existence is granted (or at least regulated, heavily) by the state. This administration believes that they don't need to treat all businesses equally under the law, and can use strong-arm intimidation tactics to get what they want. That is the problem.
    - kelseyfrog 7mo ago
      Rights are natural. We had a whole enlightenment about it.
- HarHarVeryFunny 7mo ago
  As much as I dislike Trump, I can't imagine that the military, under ANY administration, would hesitate to seize any technology that they thought was critical and was being withheld from them, especially if they can claim we're at war when special provisions apply. I remember thinking about this - basically AGI - decades ago, and it was always obvious to me that if you created such a thing there'd come a day when the MIB would be ringing the doorbell.
maxglute 7mo ago
Lots of wank about muh democratic vs authoritarian values, at the end of the day, US DoD/DoW affiliated AI will 100% kill people, sooner than later and US AI researchers will have to grasp with that. I want to charitably say eventually, but as events show, inevitably, within the calendar year... current quarter, 100s children will die because of US AI in actions most of US do not support. One can argue AI will enable more selective targets, or there will simply be more targets, and given US behavior there will always be targets. Meanwhile PRC AI researcher's work might end up murdering children... someday, and even then most likely in a war / reunification / rejuvenation project that most of Chinese support. Until then, the side not blowing up kids is going to sleep more soundly.
jongjong 7mo ago
My attitude towards democracy has worsened since AI. The problem with democracy is that it can easily become a revolving door wherein capital holders can choose which candidates are allowed to approach the door. I think democracy works well when the monetary system is constrained; for example on gold or other scarce asset because that creates a better separation between money and state because then there would be less of an incentive for big companies to corrupt the revolving door to gain a financial advantage. In a monetary system where the government can create an unlimited amount of money, the incentive to corrupt the government and political process keeps increasing. I think democracy with a soft fiat money system is probably the most dangerous system because any moral objection can be filtered out of the running as we saw happen with Anthropic and the Department of War. It's because clearly it's the weapon manufacturers running that department behind the scenes; they have a huge financial interest to do so. The Department of War is the bread and butter of weapon manufacturers and defense contractors.
- koshergweilo 7mo ago
  > The problem with democracy is that it can easily become a revolving door wherein capital holders can choose which candidates are allowed to approach the door. I've reached similar conclusions about the problems with democracy but always struggle with any potential solutions. Looking at the the world, I don't see any viable alternative forms of government, just slight variations that still suffer from the same core problems but to a lesser degree
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HocusLocus 7mo ago
This is accompanied by a 'shocked Pikachu face' when people discover that other countries' militarizes have deployed low bidder AI without guardrails. The illusion of moral superiority is the best tool of paralysis in warfare. At least the AI push has saved the human race from an uncomfortable obsession with cryptocurrency.
deleted 7mo ago
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179 points by emschwartz 7mo ago

wrs 7mo ago

> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan...? The part of the Pentagon that did this is, to put it politely, not the part that's good at planning.

ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago

[flagged]

15155 7mo ago
[flagged]
armitron 7mo ago
Dwarkesh is your run-of-the-mill vapid influencer idiot. Fridman on the other hand, when in the presence of greatness, knows to STFU and listen.
- Upvoter33 7mo ago
  “The presence of greatness” - ugh.
- throwa356262 7mo ago
  I have been told the Fridmans association with MIT is mostly a lie. Not sure if this is true, maybe someone who went to MIT around the same time can shed some light on this?
  - kleebeesh 7mo ago
    I'm a random dude on the Internet, but my partner completed her PhD at MIT. While there I knew and knew of a few PhD grads who worked at MIT in some non-tenure-track role (postdoc, staff researcher, etc). Typically for a couple years and then they get a better-paying or more permanent job. But several remained "affiliated" in some way. They kept their MIT website/email, some in academia continued to collaborate to some extent. Things like that. But AFAIK they weren't getting a paycheck from MIT. And it's somewhere between neat and genuinely professionally valuable to be affiliated w/ a prestigious university, so I don't blame them for claiming affiliation. My best guess is he's "affiliated" in a similar way.
- ademeure 7mo ago
  There's definitely something to be said for giving interesting people a platform to express their views unconditionally. Unfortunately, that can also be a very dangerous thing. I have been less and less impressed over the years with Lex's approach here. I'm personally very glad that Dwarkesh isn't like that. He's not perfect, but I think he's doing a way better job than other podcasters in the field right now.
- lovich 7mo ago
  His Zelensky interview suggests otherwise
  - ed_balls 7mo ago
    It's interesting that's the only interview when he challenged someone.
    - ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
      That's quite incredible. I had noticed that Fridman never challenges anybody. As a separate point, I never watched his interview with Zelensky because I read a headline somewhere about that interview that made me sick. I guess he did challenge somebody finally. Disgusting.
deleted 7mo ago
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scoopdewoop 7mo ago
Dwarkesh was ready to whitewash Elon the day after his Epstein emails came out. None of them should be taken seriously.
- ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
  Link please!
  - scoopdewoop 7mo ago
    The day after the emails came out he posted a video where they had beers while Elon LARPed as a human
    - ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
      Link please!
      - naves 7mo ago
        Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA
        ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
        Thanks for the link because I can't stomach 3 hours of this. First phrase: "you're saving on energy by putting data centers in space". What? 2:08 "It's harder to scale on the ground than it is in space" what?
        JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
        The argument is permitting and weather proofing are harder than lifting at certain values of scale for each. We’re not there right now. But if Starship pans out we’re at least damn close, particularly if solar-panel fabrication can be done from out-of-well silicates.
ed_balls 7mo ago
Dwarkesh is even more astroturfed than Lex Fridman. The interviews they do are just ads. No challenges, no hard questions. All seem staged and prepared.

Imnimo 7mo ago

>What we’re learning from this episode is that the government actually has way more leverage over private companies than we realized. Who is learning this for the first time only now? Even just restricting ourselves to the current administration, look at how many times Trump has directed punitive actions against private entities! Look at his actions against law firms like Perkins Coie or Covington & Burling. This is not something that just arose out of nowhere with Anthropic.

guessmyname 7mo ago
> Who is learning this for the first time only now? A teenager, probably. Not everyone is 100 years old.
synalx 7mo ago
This stood out to me too - there's an underlying assumption that private entities _can_ say no to governments, but that's only true to a point. If the government decides it needs AI-powered killbots as a matter of national security, it can and will nationalize whatever entities it needs to build them.

zer00eyz 7mo ago

> But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs. I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The whole open AI -> Anthropic saga just reeks of the same evolution of Viant/Scient. Look we have an amazing tool, but it has some fundamental shortcomings that the industry seems to want to burry its head in the sand about. The moment the hype dies and we get to engineering and practical implementations a lot is going to change. Does it have the potential to displace a lot of our current industry: why yes it does. Agents can force the web open (have you ever tried to get all your amazon purchase history?) can kill dark patterns (go cancel this service for me), and crush wedge services (how many things are shimmed into sales force that should really be stand alone apps). And the valuable engagement is going to be by PEOPLE, good UI, good user experiences are gonna be what sells (this will hit internet advertising hard for the middle men like google and Facebook).

ekidd 7mo ago
> I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The notion that 99% of the workforce and military will be AIs isn't "copium", it's grounds for absolute terror. One of two things will be true: 1. The AIs will be controlled by the Epstein class, who will then have no use for most of humanity, either as workers or soldiers. 2. Or the AIs will be controlled by the AIs themselves, which also seems worrisome. Really, any situation where 99% of the workforce and military are AIs should be deeply concerning, for reasons that should be obvious to any student of history or evolution. And, sure, maybe we won't get there in our lifetimes. But if we did, I wouldn't expect an automatic utopia.
- fn-mote 7mo ago
  The GP does not believe that AI is going to end up running 99% of everything. Ever. The GP is saying that it’s a major over-extrapolation of the current progress. You seem to be assuming we will get there instead of expecting the cracks will become more and more obvious.
ceroxylon 7mo ago
I think a lot of Dwarkesh's mentality about AI being inevitable / ubiquitous comes from the same part of him that thinks that artificial things are "good enough", e.g. the way he allows his production team to use fake plastic plants on set. Is he correct? I'm not sure, but I know there are at least a few people who notice the difference.

epgui 7mo ago

I really hate how people think LLMs == AI. An LLM can’t/shouldn’t be doing anything other than generating text.

Trasmatta 7mo ago
This is pedantic. AI has many definitions. There was "AI" powering enemies in 80s and 90s video games
guessmyname 7mo ago
I’m also as pedantic as you and use “LLM” even talking about these systems but you need to be flexible and accept that “AI” is already in everyone’s head when referring to GPT variants.
rishabhaiover 7mo ago
How is this related to the current discussion at hand?
varenc 7mo ago
LLMs are AI. Markov text generators from the 1970s/80s are AI. Face recognition software like FaceID is AI. Many people behind LLMs got degrees under departments that have AI in their title. AI is just computers doing things we typically associate with human intelligence, and having a conversation with a computer that effectively passes the Turing test, is definitely AI. If LLMs aren't AI, then AI isn't a useful term. (though agreed that LLMs aren't AGI, which I assume is what you're thinking of) Wikipedia's list of AI applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Applic...
- api 7mo ago
  This is called the AI effect: we stop calling it AI when it works. Its goal post moving to keep the sci-fi term sci-fi. There’s a similar thing with transhumanist “enhancement” or “life extension” stuff. When it actually works we call it medicine. Statistically one of the most powerful life extension techs ever developed was the cardiac bypass, which would have been sci-fi in 1900. I’ve been using stuff like Claude Code and personally feel comfortable calling this stuff AI. Is it AGI? I don’t think so, but then again I’m not totally sure what that is. Am I AGI? I’m not universally able to handle all forms of cognition well and I can’t self modify much, so I’m not sure either. I’m not even sure if AGI is a well formed concept. Intelligence is a pretty broad concept too. My pet rabbit is intelligent. Plants are intelligent. Bacteria are intelligent. Anything that can run an OODA loop, learn, adapt, and move toward a goal function is intelligent. By that definition some computer systems have been AI for decades. They’re just getting better. I think there’s intelligence all around us. We just don’t get the wow factor from it unless it talks.

bikesharing 7mo ago

[dead]

julius_eth_dev 7mo ago

[flagged]

armchairhacker 7mo ago
AI slop > The uncomfortable truth is that... > ...that the real question isn't... > Corporate resistance...introduces friction at the infrastructure layer And check comment history (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=julius_eth_dev https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=julius_eth_dev) Sometime yesterday, or further back, someone has decided to run a bot experiment (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patchnull https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patchnull, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079)
- dyauspitr 7mo ago
  I mean almost certainly but what do the sentences you’ve highlighted have to do with that.
  - armchairhacker 7mo ago
    They're AI tells. No human would write about how "corporate friction" "introduces friction at the infrastructure layer", except maybe someone who's trying to use big words to sound smart, because it barely makes sense (what "friction"? "Infrastructure layer", what are the other layers?)
    - awesome_dude 7mo ago
      AI didn't invent the terms, they were a part of the training data given to it. The real tell is that you've not been in the group of people that use these terms frequently enough for you to think they're normal. It's like the emdash alarmism, AI never invented emdash, nor did it invent using it frequently. Its training was full of examples, so many that AI picked up using it frequently.
      - 7mo ago

alecco 7mo ago

But the "Anthropic fight" is mostly fake. Palantir was using Claude as base model. Anthropic allegedly took issue with unsupervised kills because the technology wasn't ready (or something along the lines). Also, I remember reading this guy has close ties to Anthropic. Also, I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere. Like Big Tech and the establishment are propping podcasts of controlled narrative/opposition. I don't buy any of it.

Readerium 7mo ago
Yes he is room-mates with.
- cushychicken 7mo ago
  Love the interviews Dwarkesh sponsored with Sarah Paine from the Naval War College. Also, somewhat spitefully, find it funny that he has multiple roommates.
  - alecco 7mo ago
    Those ones were a bit on the nose, no?
    - _diyar 7mo ago
      How so? I enjoyed them, keeping in mind that the lecturer was a professor at a US naval war college.
      - alecco 7mo ago
        Would you like to know MORE?
        randallsquared 7mo ago
        You are pattern matching to something that doesn't really fit, I think.

dwoldrich 7mo ago

Private AI's and searchable personal data troves are the only way to go if you care about privacy. I speculate we'll discover there's very few unambiguously ethical uses of AI, much less for military applications. Them's the breaks.

SilverElfin 7mo ago

But this isn’t a fight about Anthropic, or mass surveillance, or even AI. This is a fight about lawfare, constitutional rights, and corruption. The lawfare part of it is that to coerce an individual or a company, governments are willing to abuse their power. The Biden administration did it when pressuring social media companies to censor content. The Trump administration is doing it to a much greater extent with things like ordering every government agency to stop using Anthropic and by labeling them a supply chain risk. The ideological part of it is when Defense Sec Hegseth and Trump and AI Czar / PayPal Mafia member David Sacks repeatedly attack Anthropic as “woke”, and it is clear they’re undermining this company from their government positions based on Anthropic’s speech (first amendment violation). This obviously is part of why they attacked Anthropic in such a public way. And the corruption part of it is OpenAI’s leaders being big supporters of the MAGA movement and the Trump administration. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, is the biggest donor ever to the MAGA PAC. Why did Hegseth grant a contract to OpenAI after banning Anthropic, even though OpenAI has the same red lines in their agreement (what Sam Altman claimed)? It’s because of the corruption - give Trump and his family/friends money, and you’ll get something back. The fight against these types of government abuse have ALWAYS been happening. But the abuse is much more in the open today, and much larger in scale than ever before. Scandals like Watergate would not even make the news today. And that is what the public should be waking up to and focusing on. We need to rethink our political system significantly and add a lot more protections against the kind of things the Trump 2.0 administration has done.

telotortium 7mo ago

One thing I’ve never heard a good answer to: If Anthropic is a supplier not to the Department of Defense itself, but to Palantir, why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation (assuming the government’s concerns with Anthropic having authority over military missions is valid)? As for whether code written with Claude Code should be so considered - if it’s just code that is subject to human review, I would argue that this use shouldn’t be a supply chain risk. But with Claude Code PR Review and similar products, the chance that an AI product (not limiting to Anthropic here) could own a load-bearing part of the lifecycle of a critical piece of code becomes much larger, and deserves scrutiny.

xvector 7mo ago
> why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation Because you can't designate a company a SCR because you don't like the contract you signed with them.
- telotortium 7mo ago
  But the DoD signed a contract with Palantir.
  - travismark 7mo ago
    to which Anthropic was a subcontractor. government agrees to the entire contract, including the subs
- fluidcruft 7mo ago
  This admin technically can't do a lot of the things it does. They do it anyway with utter contempt for the rule of law. Congress is useless and gives them a blank check and the Supreme Court just stalls everything using the shadow docket.
HarHarVeryFunny 7mo ago
I'm not sure that "supply chain risk" is even the right term to be discussing. What Hegseth/Trump want to do is not just stop Anthropic models from being used by any military supplier pursuant to goods/services they are providing to the military, but rather say that if you do business with the military then you must not use Anthropic at all, even if that usage is entirely unrelated to your military contracts.

ang_cire 7mo ago

The author is naive. > The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves. We don’t want the winner of the AI race to be a government which operates on the principle that there is no such thing as a truly private company or a private citizen. In the US currently, there are private citizens, and there are 'not-the-1%' citizens, where a Kavanaugh stop is legal, your voter information may be (or may have already been) seized by the DoJ or FBI, you may be tracked by out of state or federal agents on ALPRs with no warrant, for any reason, and where attending a legal protest may have your biometrics added to a database of potential domestic terrorists. Or maybe your tax money will just be used to blow up unidentified boaters or bomb girls' schools and homes, and you'll get no say in whether that's the case because the elected body that is there to issue a declaration of war (or not) as representatives of you, has abdicated that power to a cabinet of unelected white nationalists. But go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness.

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness Better than China as a global model? Still, yes, probably. Potentially. Depends on how the next few years ago. Even if America fails, I’d argue a global republic is a brighter potential future than a global dictatorship.
- propagandist 7mo ago
  As much a republic as Rome was under Caligula.
- BoredPositron 7mo ago
  A republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore.
  - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore An observation one can make when comparing a republic with the rule of law to one that ain’t, whether across time or geography. There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.

abcde666777 7mo ago

"Within 20 years 99% of the military will be AIs" That smells like such a baseless speculation that from the get go I'm not convinced of the author's rigor.

empath75 7mo ago
It’s also just a category error. It’s like saying that 99% of farm workers are tractors or 99% of textile workers are looms.
- dcre 7mo ago
  Do you not think a change in knowledge work similar in scale to the industrialization of agriculture would be significant?
  - simgt 7mo ago
    Why are you trying to change the meaning of their comment?
    - dcre 7mo ago
      They are changing the meaning of the original text. It does not say “workers.”
      - empath75 7mo ago
        It says "workforce": workforce (noun): the _people_ engaged in or available for work, either in a country or area or in a particular company or industry. Machinery is not part of the "workforce".
- aspenmayer 7mo ago
  To be fair, we don’t have many government mules these days, but it wasn’t always so, and not so long ago. The current amount of horsepower on the hoof is a rounding error, but before mechanized farming and war-fighting, these distinctions were the difference. If we consider the capacity of technology to act as a force multiplier, it is reasonable to assume that current and future AI-assisted fighting forces can achieve more with less traditional materiel and with fewer personnel. Drones are an especially likely way that these many AIs will become embodied and diversify, in which case I don’t think the percentages are so far-fetched. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62662gzlp8o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62662gzlp8o > Further ahead in the future, it wants its machines to be programmed to travel autonomously to a location, carry out its task - such as watching out for advancing enemy soldiers and engaging them if necessary - and then return to base after a certain time.

keybored 7mo ago

> [99% AI soon]... > Our future civilization will run on AI labor. And as much as the government’s actions here piss me off, in a way I’m glad this episode happened - because it gives us the opportunity to think through some extremely important questions about who this future workforce will be accountable and aligned to, and who gets to determine that. I stopped reading there because this is a pointless exercise.[1] This isn’t a roundtable. You are not even at the table. There isn’t some “thankfully time to discuss this...”—you are just out. The Machine doesn’t need your labor? You are out. No norms. No discussions. You either try to forcefully take control of the situation or you see yourself get discarded. (I am here just assuming all the AI Maximalist (doom maximalist in this context, Trump and all) premises for the sake of the argument.) [1] I did read the last paragraphs and the tenor is the same. “We must make laws and norms through our political system”… just like with nuclear bombs, of all things.

andyferris 7mo ago

> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan — to coerce and threaten to destroy every single company that won’t give them what they want on exactly their terms? I mean... isn't that pretty much the way the current administration behaves in general? If the answer to this question is "yes", and the US executive does not in fact share the values of the author about free and open society, then the rest of the article is kinda moot (except the point that we should be talking about these things now, and encouraging congress to act).

kelseyfrog 7mo ago
The administration believes that rights, in this case the right of corporate existence, are granted by the state. This is opposed to the liberal conception that rights are a product of natural existence - an essential feature of being.
- kelnos 7mo ago
  The right of corporate existence is granted (or at least regulated, heavily) by the state. This administration believes that they don't need to treat all businesses equally under the law, and can use strong-arm intimidation tactics to get what they want. That is the problem.
  - kelseyfrog 7mo ago
    Rights are natural. We had a whole enlightenment about it.
HarHarVeryFunny 7mo ago
As much as I dislike Trump, I can't imagine that the military, under ANY administration, would hesitate to seize any technology that they thought was critical and was being withheld from them, especially if they can claim we're at war when special provisions apply. I remember thinking about this - basically AGI - decades ago, and it was always obvious to me that if you created such a thing there'd come a day when the MIB would be ringing the doorbell.

maxglute 7mo ago

Lots of wank about muh democratic vs authoritarian values, at the end of the day, US DoD/DoW affiliated AI will 100% kill people, sooner than later and US AI researchers will have to grasp with that. I want to charitably say eventually, but as events show, inevitably, within the calendar year... current quarter, 100s children will die because of US AI in actions most of US do not support. One can argue AI will enable more selective targets, or there will simply be more targets, and given US behavior there will always be targets. Meanwhile PRC AI researcher's work might end up murdering children... someday, and even then most likely in a war / reunification / rejuvenation project that most of Chinese support. Until then, the side not blowing up kids is going to sleep more soundly.

jongjong 7mo ago

My attitude towards democracy has worsened since AI. The problem with democracy is that it can easily become a revolving door wherein capital holders can choose which candidates are allowed to approach the door. I think democracy works well when the monetary system is constrained; for example on gold or other scarce asset because that creates a better separation between money and state because then there would be less of an incentive for big companies to corrupt the revolving door to gain a financial advantage. In a monetary system where the government can create an unlimited amount of money, the incentive to corrupt the government and political process keeps increasing. I think democracy with a soft fiat money system is probably the most dangerous system because any moral objection can be filtered out of the running as we saw happen with Anthropic and the Department of War. It's because clearly it's the weapon manufacturers running that department behind the scenes; they have a huge financial interest to do so. The Department of War is the bread and butter of weapon manufacturers and defense contractors.

koshergweilo 7mo ago
> The problem with democracy is that it can easily become a revolving door wherein capital holders can choose which candidates are allowed to approach the door. I've reached similar conclusions about the problems with democracy but always struggle with any potential solutions. Looking at the the world, I don't see any viable alternative forms of government, just slight variations that still suffer from the same core problems but to a lesser degree

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HocusLocus 7mo ago

This is accompanied by a 'shocked Pikachu face' when people discover that other countries' militarizes have deployed low bidder AI without guardrails. The illusion of moral superiority is the best tool of paralysis in warfare. At least the AI push has saved the human race from an uncomfortable obsession with cryptocurrency.

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