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I feel like many of Anthropic's issues are due to Dario being too earnest and open. It seems both refreshing (that a CEO has thought deeply about and is willing

by jonas21 17d ago

I feel like many of Anthropic's issues are due to Dario being too earnest and open. It seems both refreshing (that a CEO has thought deeply about and is willing to talk publicly about the dangers of their product) and depressing (that so many people cynically think this is some sort of marketing ploy).

freejazz 17d ago
Yeah, the guy running a trillion dollar scam is totally the exception to CEO-ism
- ben_w 17d ago
  What's the old quote from WW2? I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo. Something like that. Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this scam/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
  - freejazz 16d ago
    Year 3 of being told my job will be replaced by AI, and the only thing that's happened so far is that AI vendors keep showing up to my office, begging me to pay them to use it is a tool. If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
    - ben_w 16d ago
      I'm looking at the millennium puzzles, and independently of those puzzles I had asked it for a fluid dynamics simulation engine that runs in my browser, and it put one together for me so I could play with aerospikes and watch the formation of Mach diamonds in rocket engines. The isochrone map generator has also been stuck on my to-do list for years, and yet now thanks to Claude, I have it, and it's real-time and multimodal. Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Sure, limited speedup, Amdahl's law and coding is not the only part of the job, but anyone who was fine at PM and QA but not code no longer needs a coder. Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers. I remember when the ability to generate music and art was "uniquely human", and sure there's a lot of cringe there with those models, but they're also winning awards and causing controversy by doing so, and artists are losing clients; I remember when the board game Go was considered to require "human intuition we could never make a computer solve, totally different to chess" (and I remember when chess was so, too). When I was a kid, cheques and letters on addresses often got read by a human; the OCR which automated this is also AI, though these days image-to-numbers is the "hello world" of the field.
      - freejazz 16d ago
        >Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers. okay, and? >Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world I'll repeat it for you again: If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
        ben_w 16d ago
        > Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world You're the one who called it a trillion dollar scam. The compensation paid to professional software developers worldwide is currently around US$1.5 trillion per year.
        freejazz 16d ago
        >You're the one who called it a trillion dollar scam. Don't pretend like the AI companies are saying its only useful for programming. You've been arguing against that the entire time.
        ben_w 15d ago
        They're not only useful for programming, it's just that programming is by itself a trillion dollar a year industry. This, by itself, is sufficient to not be the scam you assert it to be. They may not work for your industry, but then again I don't know what your industry is. Bluntly, over my lifetime, I've heard "AI will never/not in my lifetime do X" repeatedly within a year of it doing X, for many different X. It's good at getting good. The most recent one being "make useful contributions to millennium prize maths problems". A year or two before that, it was even "do well on degree-level economics essays". Artists are unhappy, not only because it rips off their work, but because businesses that were previously hiring them now use it instead. This is much smaller (strictly in terms of money) than with software, but is also measurable. Now, if you said Tesla's self-driving cars (another AI) are a trillion dollar scam, that I would even agree with. At least, for the market cap part, for actual sales it's more like a billion dollar (ish) scam.
nullbio 16d ago
It's exactly the opposite. Anthropic has earned their terrible reputation through years of lying, deceit, misdirection, gaslighting, unethical marketing strategies, etc. I remember it vividly, when Anthropic first came on the scene, people (myself included) were incredibly optimistic about them and their leadership. Everyone hated SamA and OpenAI because they felt they couldn't be trusted. Then slowly but surely, they showed their true colours. Now their reputation is in shambles due to their own behavior, and people are rooting for OAI to beat them. OAI's reputation gains have purely been a result of NOT following in the footsteps of Anthropic.

by jonas21 17d ago

freejazz 17d ago

Yeah, the guy running a trillion dollar scam is totally the exception to CEO-ism

ben_w 17d ago
What's the old quote from WW2? I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo. Something like that. Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this scam/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
- freejazz 16d ago
  Year 3 of being told my job will be replaced by AI, and the only thing that's happened so far is that AI vendors keep showing up to my office, begging me to pay them to use it is a tool. If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
  - ben_w 16d ago
    I'm looking at the millennium puzzles, and independently of those puzzles I had asked it for a fluid dynamics simulation engine that runs in my browser, and it put one together for me so I could play with aerospikes and watch the formation of Mach diamonds in rocket engines. The isochrone map generator has also been stuck on my to-do list for years, and yet now thanks to Claude, I have it, and it's real-time and multimodal. Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Sure, limited speedup, Amdahl's law and coding is not the only part of the job, but anyone who was fine at PM and QA but not code no longer needs a coder. Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers. I remember when the ability to generate music and art was "uniquely human", and sure there's a lot of cringe there with those models, but they're also winning awards and causing controversy by doing so, and artists are losing clients; I remember when the board game Go was considered to require "human intuition we could never make a computer solve, totally different to chess" (and I remember when chess was so, too). When I was a kid, cheques and letters on addresses often got read by a human; the OCR which automated this is also AI, though these days image-to-numbers is the "hello world" of the field.
    - freejazz 16d ago
      >Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers. okay, and? >Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world I'll repeat it for you again: If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
      - ben_w 16d ago
        > Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world You're the one who called it a trillion dollar scam. The compensation paid to professional software developers worldwide is currently around US$1.5 trillion per year.
        freejazz 16d ago
        >You're the one who called it a trillion dollar scam. Don't pretend like the AI companies are saying its only useful for programming. You've been arguing against that the entire time.
        ben_w 15d ago
        They're not only useful for programming, it's just that programming is by itself a trillion dollar a year industry. This, by itself, is sufficient to not be the scam you assert it to be. They may not work for your industry, but then again I don't know what your industry is. Bluntly, over my lifetime, I've heard "AI will never/not in my lifetime do X" repeatedly within a year of it doing X, for many different X. It's good at getting good. The most recent one being "make useful contributions to millennium prize maths problems". A year or two before that, it was even "do well on degree-level economics essays". Artists are unhappy, not only because it rips off their work, but because businesses that were previously hiring them now use it instead. This is much smaller (strictly in terms of money) than with software, but is also measurable. Now, if you said Tesla's self-driving cars (another AI) are a trillion dollar scam, that I would even agree with. At least, for the market cap part, for actual sales it's more like a billion dollar (ish) scam.

nullbio 16d ago

It's exactly the opposite. Anthropic has earned their terrible reputation through years of lying, deceit, misdirection, gaslighting, unethical marketing strategies, etc. I remember it vividly, when Anthropic first came on the scene, people (myself included) were incredibly optimistic about them and their leadership. Everyone hated SamA and OpenAI because they felt they couldn't be trusted. Then slowly but surely, they showed their true colours. Now their reputation is in shambles due to their own behavior, and people are rooting for OAI to beat them. OAI's reputation gains have purely been a result of NOT following in the footsteps of Anthropic.