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Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- teravor 2mo agohas there ever been a CEO (or large shareholder) that ever said anything of substance against self interest? it's a waste of time to take anything any of them say to heart, you should only read what they write to gauge what they are trying to signal.
- christophilus 2mo agoBuffett and Munger, maybe.
- AustinDev 2mo agoDario Amodei's stance on ________ is self-serving and short-sighted. It's the EA way.
- dang 2mo agoPlease don't cross into personal attack or post flamebait or take HN threads on generic tangents. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- AustinDev 2mo agoCriticizing EA is not a personal attack it's an observation of the outcomes associated with the ideology. I'm sorry if it was flamebait.
- dang 2mo agoThe person in your comment was not EA. There's always a way to make your substantive points thoughtfully, though of course this takes more time and energy - sometimes a lot more - but if you'd please invest the effort to do that when commenting here, we'd appreciate it. Or, of course, it's always an option not to post.
- AustinDev 2mo agoClaiming he's not an Effective Altruist is a stretch. He's been tightly coupled with that movement for nearly a decade.
- potsandpans 2mo agoIt's good he is getting it out in the public, on record. He'll lie, conveniently ignore techno fascist astroturfing, selectively moderate on hot topic issues and then point to some wabisabi philosophy on both sideism. The majority of top threads on hn on any given days are legit flame wars and llm accusation mud slinging. But you cant say Dario Amodei is an effective altruist. Incredible.
- AustinDev 2mo agoI'm surprised he just kept at it, honestly.
- dang 2mo agoSorry, I can see how what I wrote wasn't clear. Let me put it this way: you can criticize EA without attacking a specific person. What you did in the GP comment was to make a statement attacking the person and then mention EA as an afterbit. That made your comment a personal attack, which is not ok on HN.
- AustinDev 2mo agoFair enough. Thanks for clarifying.
- curious_cat_163 2mo agoFundamentally, we needed to decide, as a society, that should someone (anyone) have access to neural networks that can launch successful cyberattacks by discovering new zero-days and/or leveraging knowledge about recent zero-days and applying it in an adversarial way. We de-facto settled on the answer being yes. These foundation models companies have access to such systems. However, because the answer to the first question is yes, now we need to decide should everyone else be able to defend themselves with neural networks that are perhaps equally capable but are not sold by these foundation model companies as a product. I think the answer to the second question has to be a yes, IMHO.
- simianwords 2mo agoYes it’s true. But public can’t also cry about safety but simultaneously cheer for open weight models. Whatever safety concerns the public has against ChatGPT and Claude are drastically higher in open weight models. What is the right thing to do then? Accept that safety was always a farce? I’m on that camp but mildly.
- Chance-Device 2mo agoI think he probably didn’t go far enough to be honest, though I acknowledge that’s difficult to do in his position and with the amount of attacks being thrown at Anthropic at the moment. At some point open weight models will need to be restricted in some manner, likely multiple manners. We have rules about everything, you need a license to drive a car, your car must be roadworthy, your car can’t have certain modifications, you can’t drive over certain speeds, you can’t drive in certain areas at all, you have to wear a seatbelt etc. That’s one analogy amongst many, with the point being that regulation is a general public good that really does make the world a safer and better place. Nobody should care about smaller local models that don’t have significant capabilities enough to be dangerous, and people should have the right to run them locally, privately and do whatever they do with them. I don’t think that an AI monopoly or duopoly should be allowed to exist either, and I think it is possible to reach a reasonable set of compromises on each of these points, if the will exists and people can be convinced to be reasonable with one another. I think the will may not exist, and that reason is lacking in our discussions of reasoning machines, but I would like to be wrong about that.
- unclad5968 2mo agoI'm mostly ignorant to anything regarding the safety of LLMs. What makes an open-weight LLM dangerous?
- blooalien 2mo ago> What makes an open-weight LLM dangerous? Same thing that makes any LLM dangerous. The intent and actions of the person using the LLM to do bad things. Any tool can be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person...
- anon373839 2mo agoComputer keyboards are incredibly dangerous. You can even use them to type out the same text a dangerously capable LLM might write!
- Chance-Device 2mo ago
- erwald 2mo ago> Anthropic already possesses the compliance, legal, and evaluation infrastructure needed to satisfy such a regime. A university lab, startup, or community does not, even if they somehow manage to train a sufficiently capable model. All the actual proposals that Dario Amodei has endorsed with regard to safety testing and so on have exempted smaller models. I don't think university labs or startups would ever be hit by any such regulation.
- gonight 2mo agoHave exempted smaller models so far. Seems like they're trying to soft-launch then tighten the ratchet, and I'd be willing to accept that this is a cynical view if this hasn't been the modus operandi for a while now. See EA/Sony/etc. continually trying to find a way to get their foot in the "always online, you're just renting the game" door.
- erwald 2mo ago> Furthermore, export controls, for which Dario Amodei openly advocates, are already prompting China to build its own chips. China is, of course, behind the West, but not as much as you may think. Instead of adopting a Western technology stack and relying on our technology to build its AI models, China will increasingly rely on its own chips, reducing Western leverage. China has been working hard to indigenize AI chip making since well before the October 2022 export controls. I don't think the controls had zero effect, but overall I think the effect is often very overstated, and anyway it's irreversible (there's no way China will stop its self-sufficiency efforts even if the AI chip ban is lifted; the CCP will always ensure there's a large enough domestic market carved out for every Huawei Ascend produced). Cf. https://newsletter.decisiontreeresearch.com/p/how-much-did-us-semiconductor-export https://newsletter.decisiontreeresearch.com/p/how-much-did-u...
- tristanj 2mo agoI used to think that export controls didn't work, until I realized that China has leapfrogged the West on every technology that wasn't subject to export controls.
- disgruntledphd2 2mo agoTo be brutally frank, this was always going to happen when Western countries outsourced their manufacturing. And all of the rationales were self serving garbage, it was about juicing the next quarters numbers. Fundamentally though, it's the removal of capital controls that has driven a lot of this behaviour, and it's amusing to me that reintroducing them is so far beyond the Overton window that it never even comes up.
- throw1234567891 2mo agoWhat did you expect. The West built factories in China and said “look, this is how we do it, now you do it”.
- cadamsdotcom 2mo agoWhat makes me most sad is there are people at Anthropic, Dario included, who want to do good. But thanks to financialization their incentives get in the way.
- snootypoot 2mo ago[dead]