13 ms·

On AI regulation and messaging

• dude250711 2mo ago
  So, what does a for-profit CEO, beholden to profit-seeking investors, have to say?
  • ed_mercer 2mo ago
    Yes, he has financial incentives. That doesn't automatically make what he says false or dishonest.
    • gbrindisi 2mo ago
      it kinda does unless he is straightforward about his financial incentives
      • DangitBobby 2mo ago
        Lol. If he included everything you'd claim he needs to sound honest you'd criticize him for being long winded instead.
        • webdood90 2mo ago
          What in the world could possibly compel you to shill for this man?
          • DangitBobby 2mo ago
            Being tired of contrarian bickering on literally every fucking comment section of this god forsaken website
        • simoncion 2mo ago
          That's what either a disclosures section or a series of footnotes at the end is for. For folks who care about quality discussion and writing, it's a tragedy that people are using microblogging tools to publish essays. The length restrictions enforced by and inferior formatting tools provided by these things make it difficult to have serious talks about complex topics. Of course -for a subset of the population- those limitations are a feature, rather than a bug.
• jacquesm 2mo ago
  * * *
• darkwater 2mo ago
  Why the comment submitted by jacquesm, who posted the link and it's not exactly an anonymous poster, that said "Apologies for linking to X but this is worth reading." has been flagged to death??
  • isoprophlex 2mo ago
    i was about to post the same thing. i vouched for the comment, but it's too dead to recover from my single vouching action.
  • raverbashing 2mo ago
    This site's audience has been less of the technical curious kind and more of the pathological misalignment one
  • defrost 2mo ago
    Vouched. (A few more might resurrect it)
  • coldtea 2mo ago
    Maybe because "apologies for linking to X" is needless gaudy virtue signalling. Make it "Apologies for linking to Amodei" and we're talking.
    • dyauspitr 2mo ago
      Just seems like virtue to me.
      • deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
  • eru 2mo ago
    You can 'vouch' for a comment, if you think it shouldn't be flagged.
    • darkwater 2mo ago
• isoprophlex 2mo ago
  > "I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world." > wall of text follows > doesnt proceed to clearly tell us what the actual picture of the world is, then am i correct in summarizing that the line of reasoning is - frontier llm access means you are at an economic advantage - a big risk of this is ongoing wealth concentration - the "open weights" approach can't solve the problem of wealth and llm access being linked; you need compute too, and compute is expensive, thus "open weights" still favors the wealthy - instead we need "objective and fair institutional processes", as this will allow small labs cook up their stuff while frontier labs get regulated why would i care about what these smaller players do, if economic advantage = frontier model access? also, the reasoning around "why bother with open weights because compute is expensive too" seems like the kind of logic a motivated 12 year old could work their way around in 30 seconds. things are not either/or dario, you said so yourself. seems like a 400 word corpo misdirection essay. par for the course.
  • knollimar 2mo ago
    He seems to be grasping for a point but not providing argument for what it is exactly. And certainly not support that is logically coherent
• maeln 2mo ago
  > This is why Anthropic has always made its policy proposals very carefully. We try very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors. > ... > completely exempt any company below a certain amount of revenue or model training costs from being covered at all One could argue that "Frontier AI" company know they have nothing to fear from company with less than XM$ revenue, and so their support for this type of regulation is still a way to force regulatory capture. In any case, whatever regulation you support, it's a regulation that you didn't have to handle when you were growing, but that incumbent will have to deal with. Whatever it is Dario's intention or not does not matter. Capitalism push to consolidation and the eventual regulation that will need to be applied to mitigate the externality from a new industry, will mean that their will only be a handful of "very big" winner. Same story since the beginning of the industrial era. Even if that's not what Dario personally want, it's in the best interest of the shareholders, which will force Anthropic to do everything it can to be one of the big one. > Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). The same can be said about a lot of other industry (aviation, oil, chip manufacturing, ...). Every country / union big enough will finance their own champion to try to keep a foot in the industry even if they are not the best.
• thiago_fm 2mo ago
  Dario's messaging has been extremely confusing and HE'S RESPONSIBLE for further increasing the negative sentiment of the public towards AI. He's clearly focusing on being on the news to provoke emotions on people, preparing for the Anthropic big blockbuster IPO. Dario, Sam Altman and others should instead be praying every night that this will take us to the Singularity VERY SOON, because if it doesn't, the entire country will blame them for absolutely destroying their retirement and the US' economy once this AI Datacenter bubble pops.
  • eru 2mo ago
    There are other countries.
• axegon_ 2mo ago
  Called it! He was bound to squeal after the release of QWEN 3.8 in one way or another and here it is. I wasn't even a teenager but I'm getting so much Jobs/Ballmer flashbacks with internet explorer and microsoft office. Edit: Does anyone else notice the switching between dashes and em-dashes between paragraphs? Tells you a lot about the man, doesn't it.
  • zxexz 2mo ago
    > Edit: Does anyone else notice the switching between dashes and em-dashes between paragraphs? Tells you a lot about the man, doesn't it. That he doesn’t know how to use basic word processing, or even agent SKILLS.md or whatever it’s called now. Or maybe it’s just the next generation of vagueposting.
  • onion2k 2mo ago
    Tells you a lot about the man, doesn't it. The CEO of Anthropic not using AI extensively would be news.
  • raldi 2mo ago
    I don’t understand your edit; can you quote an example switch?
  • kilroy123 2mo ago
    Putting on my tin-foil hat here. I suspect we'll see major RAM shortages well into the 2030s to stop the commoners from having enough RAM to run powerful local models.
  • jacquesm 2mo ago
    And open source in general. Also: keep in mind that without open source to feed it there would have been no agentic coding.
• pu_pe 2mo ago
  > Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chips (which are roughly the frontier labs plus maybe hardware providers). This is actually a good point. Open models are getting better and better, some of them might even be useful in consumer hardware now. But if AI performance is still correlated with compute power, then no doubt power will remain with the people owning the chips.
  • pas 2mo ago
    Arguably the question is whether it's economically feasible to self-host something similar. Are you self-hosting Google or Bing? No, but we have quite a huge ecosystem of full-text search tools with PageRank, with options to scale to almost Google scale (if you have the money). After all LLM training starts with the same crawl mechanism. As long as barriers to entry is not too high (ie. it makes sense to take the risk to start a business that provides something similar - usually for a niche) market forces work. We have the classic empirical chart reproducing microeconomics. https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder/generic-competition-and-drug-prices https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res... And setting up a pharma plant is also very capital intensive. Here the obvious barrier to entry is completely artificial. (Which provides an incentive to spend a lot of money on R&D -- though it naturally raises the question of Pareto efficiency.)
    • spwa4 2mo ago
      You're missing the point, what will happen is this: 1) in things like tax law, registering with city hall, dealings with the DMV, your phone subscription, insurance contract, ... you will find that one of the new fine prints in the contract will be that you're not allowed to use AI to communicate with them. 2) because of how SynthID works (you need the SynthID keys to verify, which are secret. So the only way to find if text is ChatGPT/Google/Anthropic watermarked is to ask ChatGPT/Google/Anthropic), government and large companies can enforce this against you. That is what the watermark is for. To end any insurance claim written by AI with "you're not allowed to submit AI written insurance claims" and refuse it outright there and then. "Sorry your request was AI watermarked and pursuant to law 234 of 2025/03/11 chapter 3258 paragraph 33 decile 1299 we hereby close it without response" 3) when they reply, however, they use a custom model that also has custom SynthID keys. You will not even be able to tell their responses are AI written, or at least, you won't be able to prove it. You won't be able to enforce any AI-related rights (ie. the right to talk to a human) you have under the law against large companies. In other words: this is to make sure that all the advantages AI provides are available to deny your unemployment claim, and to Verizon to charge you more, but completely inaccessible TO YOU when you want to change to a cheaper subscription. They can inundate YOU with AI-written requests BUT YOU CAN'T. Self-hosting helps because it prevents them from verifying if your responses are AI written, because you can generate non-watermarked AI text and so there is a level playing field.
• glimshe 2mo ago
  One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance. I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.
  • mschuster91 2mo ago
    > If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance. A product still requires a lot of handholding and human thinking, at least if one does not want everyone even throwing a glance at it to immediately be repulsed by the usual AI slop tells. > I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity. It absolutely already is a historical game changer on par with the Industrial Revolution when it comes to the amount of jobs destroyed and economies screwed up - and the impact will be even worse in 10+ years as existing seniors retire but no new seniors rise as AI has destroyed entry level career paths.
    • glimshe 2mo ago
      Not disagreeing with you, but adding to my argument. Despite the human handholding, I feel that 3 years would have been enough for 18 months of thinking about the product plus 18 months where a team could get 3-5 years worth of coding/development done. Yet, we haven't seen anything big yet, like a new Youtube/Instragram, an amazing videogame, a major cure etc. Maybe they are coming, but every day that passes is an indication that the net productivity positive of the technology isn't as big as advertised. In my own personal use of AI, I experienced a 30-50% increase in productivity, but no more than that.
      • lukeschlather 2mo ago
        It's only been at most the past year where AI has been unambiguously helpful and not a hindrance. 3 years ago it gave the appearance of being helpful but it tended to be more of a hindrance.
• petesergeant 2mo ago
  I think that Dario is intelligent, incisive, has good judgement, and is well-intentioned. I hope he continues to wield influence. I think Sam is also most of those things, but I think power has a One Ring-like effect on him. My most contrarian view is that I think Elon’s problems are primarily appalling judgement when it comes to areas outside of tech, and has the emotional regulation of a child, although somewhat incredibly I believe he is fundamentally well intentioned. I don’t think any of those three really want tech feudalism, although I think the current US administration would press a “turn us into Russia” button the second they caught sight of it, which is to say, I think they have the worst of intentions.
  • mschuster91 2mo ago
    > I think Sam is also most of those things, but I think power has a One Ring-like effect on him. That's putting it mildly, very mildly. The guy all but wrecked the entire world's DRAM supply chain by using negotiation tactics that, if there were any semblance of regulatory authority left in the US, would lead to criminal charges for market manipulation. Arrest Sam Altman, he is one of the most dangerous people on the planet. Not a single shred of respect for the 99% and the consequences his actions have on them. (And similar things apply to the other controversial figure you mentioned, Elon Musk actively enjoys hurting people by the looks of it.)
• coldtea 2mo ago
  > I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world. To paraphrase Sinclair "It's difficult to make a man realize the issues with regulatory capture, if they're to be the benefactor of regulatory capture". > A crude analogy is that the formal court system can sometimes feel stuffy and elitist, but it does a much better job of defending the rights of vulnerable individuals than the alternative, mob justice. Not so sure. After all lack of the latter did help establish the current tech overlord rule.
  • meindnoch 2mo ago
    > A crude analogy is that the formal court system can sometimes feel stuffy and elitist, but it does a much better job of defending the rights of vulnerable individuals than the alternative, mob justice. Especially when said individuals are rich.
• Depurator 2mo ago
  It will be interesting to see what kind of progress in biology and medicine they will preview during the fall. He does make a good point that most of the progress so far have not been material in the sense of providing real positive outcomes for ordinary people. Or even for the HN crowd, when will we see e.g. "Mythos aided research discovers 10 new viable battery technologies"
  • rimliu 2mo ago
    None?
    • Depurator 2mo ago
      Fair enough, help navigating complex and bureaucratic processes, personal validation and a more tailored search engine do provide some value
  • QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
    > He does make a good point that most of the progress so far have not been material in the sense of providing real positive outcomes for ordinary people. Even worse, it has made a significant number of people's lives worse. Some major, like layoffs, some less major, like PC prices, some are just annoyed by AI slop. And then Dario himself wouldn't stop yapping about white collar work being gone in X years...
• kilpikaarna 2mo ago
  > I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing. > We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that. Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc. Rather we'll just do all of that even harder and the miracles ("curing cancer", lol) we've so far failed to deliver are bound to arrive in short order!
  • amarcheschi 2mo ago
    rapture but for tech people
    • spwa4 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      • trentor 2mo ago
        The only factual point you made is solved on February second. All Model providers have to provide offline tooling to check for invisible watermarking.
        • 2mo ago
• onion2k 2mo ago
  When people talk about Qwen 3.8 being on a par with Fable, they're really talking about Qwen 3.8 Max aka Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B. That's a 2.4 trillion parameter Mixture of Experts model with 95B active parameters. You need about 400GB of RAM to run it. No one is running that locally. The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models. When Dario talks about open weights not being a solution this is what he means - if you don't have 400GB of VRAM lying around the fact that there's an open model like Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B doesn't really help much. If we're not regulating how models are available, or making sure access is open, then RAM prices will mean everything concentrates on a few very rich companies.
  • woadwarrior01 2mo ago
    > The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models. Does it have to be? There are plenty of coding tasks, where it's good enough.
    • onion2k 2mo ago
      Practically, no, the distill is great. It's fine to use it. However, if you're having a discussion about access to frontier models, and using Qwen 3.8 as an example of how open weights is a solution, then you should be honest and accurate about what you're talking about. Making an argument like "People can run Qwen 3.8 at home. That shows open weights are great." is a bit disingenuous if you're not also making it clear that you're not talking about Qwen 3.8 Max (or that you have a beast of a PC at home :D ).
      • woadwarrior01 2mo ago
        I agree 100%. IMO, it all started with ollama misrepresenting the Deepseek R1 distills as Deepseek R1, all for hype and marketing. I've had so many ostensibly technical people telling me: "I tried DeepSeek R1 and it was terrible", and every time when I probe further they'd tried the tiny 1.5B Qwen2.5 distill model that was further brain damaged by ollama's naive RTN quantization[1]. DeepSeek themselves were very forthright about it by naming it DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B[2]. I suppose the road to technical hell is paved with marketers and grifters. :) [1]: https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1:1.5b https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1:1.5b [2]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-...
• kingstnap 2mo ago
  > Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power > Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution Which is exactly why Anthropic contributes nothing to, and actively pushes for roadblocks and regulations for open weight models. Can't allow any hope to the masses. Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable. Which of course we have have aggressive guardrails for in case you even try to use it for something dangerous like AI model developement. Plus we are going to retain all data submitted to it just in case someone is trying to be sneaky.
  • quikoa 2mo ago
    > something dangerous like AI model developement It's very dangerous to Anthropic's bottomline!
  • simoncion 2mo ago
    > Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable. This was primarily a clever way to try to shore up their revenue numbers. By preventing folks who don't have seven-to-twelve-figure bank account balances from using the tools that were most expensive to build, they might actually stand to make money from those tools... once they're forced to do accounting that includes the cost to make those tools. As a bonus, R&D cost for serving the fixed-price-subscription rabble can be massively reduced by providing them with older tools that have had the goop around them tweaked just enough to make the tool's output have a different "flavor". That class of customer will never know that they're being conned.
• BrenBarn 2mo ago
  > I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. It is so tragicomic to see people whose lives are built around companies coming so close to realizing that everything they do is bad, and then at the last minute swerving aside to convince themselves that no, if they just do more of it and somehow do it "better", then it will all be okay. The reason people don't trust companies and believe they are cooking up some new way to screw them over is because that is what they are doing. If Dario or anyone else really wanted to dispel that perception there's an easy way: do a total 180 and start fighting against everything you've been pushing. But none of them will do that because they still fundamentally believe that what they are doing is good, and are unable to see that fundamentally it's bad.
• nnmg 2mo ago
  From anthropic we now have Science as a PR strategy. God I can't wait until this bubble pops.
• brador 2mo ago
  For $20 a month you can experience what it’s like to have a 130+ iq for a few minutes a day. Why does this need a master? Do we regulate bio geniuses for the danger they pose? No, we do not. Do we regulate other tools like hammers and drills? No. Books? No.
• mindwok 2mo ago
  I genuinely think Dario is a well intentioned, intelligent dude, but I think him and Anthropic have a huge PR problem and are really out of touch with how they're perceived. Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary Person. All the safety rhetoric, never supporting open weight models, the lockdowns on harnesses outside claude code, etc. Anthropic if you care about public good, do something to empower people. Release an OSS model. Open source Claude Code. Open source some inference tooling or something. Just give people anything except your words.
  • written-beyond 2mo ago
    No big tech founder CEO ever was or ever will be well intentioned.
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo ago
      There are probably many CEO tech founders of small companies that are well intentioned, but our economic system ensures that only the most sociopathic among them become CEOs of the big ones.
    • cobbzilla 2mo ago
      Oil CEOs are well intentioned. A different kind of well, but, oh well.
  • 7373737373 2mo ago
    And maybe don't allow the military to use your AI WHEN YOU CAN'T TELL WHETHER IT WAS INVOLVED IN THE KILLING OF HUNDREDS OF SCHOOL CHILDREN
    • yoavm 2mo ago
      [flagged]
• toasty228 2mo ago
  The tech industry cooking up some new way to screw people over for 25 years The tech execs waking up on a random monday: > I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. No shit Dario, no shit...
  • Havoc 2mo ago
    Yeah and we’re not even done with dealing with the societal consequences of social media and dopamine algorithm driven everything
  • knollimar 2mo ago
    That sounds like a "dismissal attack" and we're giving you less now to combat it
• livinglist 2mo ago
  > Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). If only money thirsty capitals didn’t drain the HBM/DRAM/NAND capacity to rush to build out all the data centers so that they can make money off of inference, driving up memory prices like mad man leaving consumers with not only no chance of local inference setup, but also higher price of consumer electronics. Of course it has nothing to do with regulation, more to do with the greed.
• mcntsh 2mo ago
  So the solution to convince the public that these companies aren’t “looking for new ways to screw them over” is to try to go into biomedical research. I guess it’ll be great for Anthropic to have the cure for cancer, but what’s that gonna mean for people with cancer? Funny how he doesn’t talk about that part.
• seydor 2mo ago
  Is this cure of cancer in the room with us?
  • danqqqq 2mo ago
    [dead]
• xscott 2mo ago
  Any argument about regulation in the US which doesn't mention that China and other countries aren't bound by that regulation should be heavily questioned. Exactly who are you stopping from doing what you don't like?!? Law abiding US citizens won't be able to run them, but you didn't solve anything other than making sure US citizens pay Sam or Dario.
  • blitzar 2mo ago
    Any arguments that US laws or regulations should apply to people in other countries should be heavily questioned.
    • xscott 2mo ago
      That's definitely not an argument I was making.
  • shimman 2mo ago
    As a US citizen I do not care about regulating China, they can figure out themselves. Just as they figured out how to imprison their corrupt CEOs, I'm confident they won't let corporations destroy their society like the US. I rather let citizens of my country exercise our own authority and agency when deciding what is necessary for good societal outcomes (LLMs aren't necessary).
    • xscott 2mo ago
      I think you might misunderstand. The regulation isn't about what OpenAI and Anthropic can do. It's about what you, a citizen, can do.
      • shimman 2mo ago
        I'm lobbying the government by helping elect politicians into Congress that want to impose a national moratorium on new DCs and helping organize groups across the US on how to properly resist these things.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• locitra 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• jLaForest 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  • meindnoch 2mo ago
    context: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/08/14/who-is-cami-clark-anthropic-ceos-wife-asked-epstein-to-invest-in-porn-business/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/08/14/who-is-... "Cami Clark, the low-profile wife of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, tried to court Jeffrey Epstein as an investor for her “luxury porn company” and women’s health startup, the Wall Street Journal and emails in the Epstein files reveal, as the Journal’s reporting raises new questions about Clark’s influence over her powerful husband and his company." What a slimy couple.
    • jacquesm 2mo ago
      Details...
      • meindnoch 2mo ago
        pardon?
        • jacquesm 2mo ago
          That these aren't details. And for some reason there is always an Epstein connection.
  • arm32 2mo ago
    This makes him immediately lose all credibility related to common judgement, safety or alignment IMHO.
• fabsalvadori 2mo ago
  I see little conversation about AI powering robots' core and the fact that we are going to have like a billion robots by the end of this decade. Yes, sorry if trust is low.
• saidnooneever 2mo ago
  he notes how to critisze frontier labs for failing to deliver, but says also not to blame their marketing. That is next level dim, because the marketing sets expectations for what they will deliver. this guy need to stop vibeposting nonsense.
• doubtfuluser 2mo ago
  > „… it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people …“ Nothing beats the hubris of the Silicon Valley CEOs and self proclaimed “elite”. I’m missing people calling out “we are better than that”… NOT
• cloudie78 2mo ago
  How’s that moat coming along, Dario? Or are we still doing the lawfare strat since you can’t get any meaningful lead on Chinese models? How about the involvement in the Iran bombing that killed 160, out of which 120 were kids? Forgive me if Anthropic doesn’t really rhyme with trust over here.
• andrewstuart 2mo ago
  Is he worried? Dario is always deeply worried. I read somewhere he is the Woody Allen of AI.
  • shimman 2mo ago
    His wife is a known Epstein clout chaser, so this tracks.
• ben8bit 2mo ago
  I really liked their brand position a year ago. But having Boris talk about "Claude's brain" on stage & their other founder pretending AI is sentient in front of the pope - they're coming off more as a religion than a tech company (and this is aside from the obvious model issues they're having).
  • seydor 2mo ago
    That s the thing with all US companies (chinese cos don't seem to go metaphysical)
    • ipsod 2mo ago
      Is that just the companies speaking to their prospective markets? Maybe the US public loves metaphysical.
• mhaberl 2mo ago
  > We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that. 1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag about it as loudly as possible. Admirable dude! I actually trust him on this 100% 2. “We hope to have incredible results” -> doesn’t everybody hope to have incredible results? 3. “Some early glimmers in the coming months” -> is that planned for a few days before the IPO? This guy says less than politicians do.
  • bdangubic 2mo ago
    > This guy says less than politicians do. This is a good thing cause all politicians lie all the time :)
    • advael 2mo ago
      As do CEOs. My impression is that in the absence of significant selection pressure to weed it out, this strategy is quite effective for gaining power and influence, and that such pressure is at an all time low right now
    • pixel_popping 2mo ago
      People lie all the time.
      • fn-mote 2mo ago
        When people in power lie, it lowers trust in all society. I don’t want to live in a low-trust society, so I am against lying by CEOs and politicians.
        • pixel_popping 2mo ago
          Agreed, but that doesn't change the fact that people lie in general. Most people start lying long before they reach any position of power and in many cases, lying is exaclyt how they got there. That's what makes it hard to fix: by the time someone is in power, the behavior has already been rewarded and is already doing a snowball effect. I'm not defending it (especially in Politics, it shouldn't be legal), just acknowledging reality that people lie about tiny things, so of course they lie about big things. It's more of a people problem, not only a people-in-power problem. In practice, I doubt that they have a way out of all the lie-parade as well while being able to maintain their position, imagine if today any politician/CEO suddenly acknowledge "oh sorry guys, all that time we were just lying" => Career death (with snowball effect)
• throwaway_7274 2mo ago
  Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened? Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.
  • raincole 2mo ago
    > I wonder how that happened Layoff.
    • throwaway_7274 2mo ago
      Rhetorically wondering :)
      • jacquesm 2mo ago
        Unfortunately it is not just the engineers that get laid off. Try finding a job as a translator, a copy writer or some other entry or mid level service economy kind of job.
        • throwaway_7274 2mo ago
          It’s unfortunate no matter who!
          • jacquesm 2mo ago
            Yes, but those other people can not be said to be causing this for themselves.
  • nozzlegear 2mo ago
    > be aware of the pendulum dynamics. What do you mean?
    • throwaway_7274 2mo ago
• agnosticmantis 2mo ago
  > Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine I hope they have better sandboxes in their biology lab than they did in their cyber security lab. More seriously, these sociopaths will soon release lab-made viruses into the world to prove AI's capability and to force governments into regulation of open models. It should be obvious by now that with their savior complex, the goals (cure cancer, AI safety, save humanity) justify any means.
• GPerson 2mo ago
  I don’t think my people got my previous post but apparently a lot of diseases were on track to being cured regardless of the invention of LLM based AI. One thing that bothers me about this technology is it makes it easy to attribute all effort to it. This not only hurts the ego but also makes it difficult to reason about how effective it is compared to how effective the people using it are. Secondly, if you look at what Dario has actually written, then the cure to the big conditions like cancer is in his view hopefully going to be a result of scientists working 10x faster and therefore making big Nobel prize paradigm shifting discoveries 10x faster. So Anthropic suggesting “we are going to cure cancer” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. According to his original vision it looks like a bunch of groups now using AI independently producing breakthroughs which cure cancer.
• 3dsnano 2mo ago
  i’m all for ambition and tenacity, but this is psychopath level communication… blissfully unaware, simply incapable of reading the room if claude still can’t yet write and refactor coherent code (on its own, replacing software engs, just like he said last year), why would we expect it to… fucking cure cancer?
  • cindyllm 2mo ago
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• miyoji 2mo ago
  > I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. Oh gosh, I can't imagine why that might be, could it be the history of screwing us over? If you want to build trust, I have a simple suggestion that Anthropic or OpenAI could implement today, if they wanted, and it would make me trust them probably 1000x more than I do today. That change is quite simple: stop selling to governments and enterprise. If you really believe in this product, you can earn enough money from regular people, you don't need government money and you don't need to sell to those corporations we don't trust. Just sell it only to individuals directly and add in your TOS that no company can force employees to use your product, or you won't sell it to anyone who works there anymore. This would strongly signal that you don't want AI to concentrate power, since you won't sell it to concentrations of power. It would build a lot of trust. Oh, you want to "cure cancer" instead? Of course you do. Why am I backing away slowly? Maybe because I'm pretty sure you're cooking up a way to screw me.
• greatgib 2mo ago
  I think that this guy and Anthropic are a clear example of the "power corrupt" rule. Basically he is probably a nice guy and well meaning from his point of view. But, now that they hold a huge power to impact "on demand" AI usage and regulation, and they are kind of the tip of a monopoly on advanced AI, they will see themselves as more important than anyone else, and with the moral duty to impose their view on everyone that hasn't the worth as them. Just imagine if the company was still a small outsider, their official point of view would probably be a lot different. Especially with something like "regulation is a barrier to entry"...
• alansaber 2mo ago
  Vast majority of AI headlines are 1. bad or 2. gimmicks or 3. remarkably charitable forward thinking- this is self inflicted
• AnodicElegy 2mo ago
  "I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better. The bulk of the essay is devoted to refuting skepticism of AI’s potential in health and biology, and showing why I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people and frankly to biologists as well (I used to be one!). And, if you read my most recent essay (Policy on the AI Exponential), I discuss concrete proposals for how to streamline the FDA process to make sure the deluge of AI-accelerated drugs isn’t slowed down by the regulatory process." This is fantasy, and I believe the vast majority of those actually working in pharmaceutical R&D would agree. Contrast Amodei's opinion here to the Derek Lowe post I shared recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313367 . Derek Lowe's opinion is closest to my own experience: AI, whether it be traditional ML or LLMs, can help here and there -- the former to help you to triage paths to explore in a way that's a little better than intuition in some cases, the latter mostly to generate code faster in the code-dependent aspects of pharma research -- but neither of these things are significantly widening the main bottlenecks. I don't think the data exists to do so, especially since so much of pharma R&D is looking for higher and higher hanging fruit (i.e. exploring avenues for which a trove of relevant training data does not already exist).
  • seydor 2mo ago
    We need proof that AI can climb the vertical axis and is not just horizontally expanding on what we already know. ANNs (including LLMs) are approximators of things that already exist , but science occasionally needs paradigm shifts and we have not yet seen any of it with AI.
• hn5nw0vcqg 2mo ago
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• jbs789 2mo ago
  I am skeptical of David. But he is spot on with this comment: “Yet Dario blames public negativity on a long-standing loss of trust in institutions rather than his own messaging.“ Dario’s arrogance and blind spots are really something to behold.
  • cucumber3732842 2mo ago
    I think he's on to something. Nobody is worried about any AI company in the abstract the way people are worried about other companies in the abstract (e.g. an oil company might ruin the environment just simply as a byproduct of engaging in their core business). Everybody worried about their government, their utility companies, their employer, their landlord, all the faceless BigCos they do business with, etc, etc. getting their grubby mitts on AI and then using it to screw them even more than they're already being screwed. The whole system is set up to screw people right now and it does it as fast and as hard as it can. AI is see as bad to the extent that it lets the screwing happen at a higher tempo.
• lenerdenator 2mo ago
  Cut your prices and stop expecting everyone to sacrifice their jobs and their wallets for your vision and desire to be a trillionaire. Ta-da. Trust crisis solved.
• stego-tech 2mo ago
  That is an incredible amount of words to expend upon a position tantamount to “neener neener we won’t change a thing and you’re in the wrong for doubting us.” I’d really appreciate it if folks stopped paying more attention to the bloviating or whinging of AI executives and instead focused exclusively on their actions, for therein lies the true nature of their goals or vision.
• __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. The way to do this is with large automated wetlabs running experiments and generating novel training data on the behavior of cells. It's with partnerships with governments and universities that educate the masses to the point where many of us are better able to contribute towards the project of growing the available knowledge in a useful way. It's with more NIH funding and fewer anti-science propagandists attacking that funding so they can sell their snake oil without pesky facts getting in the way. What's actually happening is our data centers are spewing carcinogens into places where humans will breathe them and we're lying to ourselves about how if we just keep going this way we'll cure cancer. Stop making the world less habitable by trying to squeeze another drop of model utility out of the existing knowledge, and start helping with the creation of new knowledge. It's going to take decades to ramp up. Let's turn the page and get started.
• dogleash 2mo ago
  >or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over Looks like Amodi is laying the groundwork so he can re-run Eric Schmidt's "but it happened" playbook. Do whatever you can to make money, wait for the dust to settle and walk off into the sunset after one final "whoopie daisy, didn't mean to do that to you. sucks to suck."
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• game_the0ry 2mo ago
  There were may companies that announced layoffs and cited ai as one of the factors: Amazon, Oracle, Meta, Microsoft, Block, Salesforce, Cisco, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Coinbase, Snap, GitLab, Monday.com. Both founders of Anthropic and OpenAI have talked about how AI will replace many jobs, and did so with a sense of doom and urgency. And yet...they are (pikachu face) surprised that people do not want data centers (which will increase utility costs for consumers) and graduates boo tech leaders at commencement ceremonies? Tech leaders are clueless.
• WorseIsBetter 2mo ago
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• MMTlover 2mo ago
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• VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
  The less he says the better. This was saying way too much in a far too pretentious way, without addressing the core problems. It's not quite Sam Altman levels of delusional, but it's up there. This is not how to swing the pendulum back in a positive direction. Want to make a difference? Make AI use little to no natural resources, stop eating up RAM, stop making everything expensive, etc. Otherwise, don't talk.
• blitzar 2mo ago
  Never meet your heroes. Also ... Never read the tweets of your heroes.
• mannanj 2mo ago
  Isn't trust fundamentally about honesty, reputation and good will? How can you restore trust by ignoring the past deception, bad will and abuse - Is Dario saying you simply ignore that, and deliver on an outcome later? If I break my agreements of how to treat people and they do not trust me, it's on me to restore that trust through acting different and showing them I've changed. It takes ownership of my past actions too, not just shoving them under a rug.
• mbgerring 2mo ago
  I don’t think it’s a messaging problem or a trust problem. I think it’s that the world AI boosters want to create is one that most people don’t want to live in. “You will be fundamentally without agency or purpose, and people you don’t like will shape the world you live in forever according to their whims” sounds bad to most people. Having cures for disease so that I can live longer in a world that I’d rather not live in at all doesn’t sound like a good trade.
  • jacquesm 2mo ago
    They might want to live in it but they won't be able to afford it.
• polytely 2mo ago
  What is the lesswrong-crowd answer to the non-existential risk to working people? I'm way more worried about these guys breaking the economy in such a way that enriches them and makes me poorer, than I'm about any existential risk these guys cook up in their thought experiments. Like if you are making more money than god in silicon valley I guess you don't really fear losing your job or house, but for most people that would be quite bad. I never hear these guys articulate what their concrete vision for the economy if they make ASI / AGI happen (one of those is the correct shibboleth and I don't remember which).
  • jacquesm 2mo ago
    This comment exactly nails it. That's the feeling that this all gives me. Sorry for the inconvenience, but we just had to bankrupt all of you to save humanity...
• w10-1 2mo ago
  > by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us I don't think it's on them. Proximally, it's not their job to deliver the end-use value; it's their customers' job (if they're doing it, it would be a strong sign of tying). More generally, they operate as a commercial SaaS entity (non-profit or not), and net benefit to the world is not what any company is structured for (even public benefit corporations have mainly indirect effects). So I think that "criticism" is just a back-handed way of promoting themselves in messianic terms. IMHO Anthropic, OpenAI et al continue the practices that make people resent companies (US companies): You have to be either connected or nominal (show of diversity) to actually participate in the opportunities or protect yourself from their predations. That's just the nature of knowledge work: you need a ladder of opportunities that start very early to participate, and you'd need to understand subtleties of engagement to see how you're being fleeced as a customer. The divide of rich to poor is not about money but both knowledge and access; it's felt even by long-time experts in the field who are left out or ousted.
• tngranados 2mo ago
  > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. Then, proceeds at promising it again, without delivering. Amazing. > We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.