Is it? Would bioweapon instruction restrictions be equivalent to disallowing reporting on whether the government is massacring large numbers of citizens in your city? Both are ‘censorship’ but don’t seem remotely equivalent to me.
Do you believe it’s only censorship where context shouldn’t be applied? Like if someone had a principled view "violence is wrong", would non-lethal violence in a clear case of self-defense be “equally wrong” as the guy who personally killed tens of thousands of captured POWs (Blokhin)? As “violence is violence”?
>> Would bioweapon instruction restrictions be equivalent to disallowing reporting on whether the government is massacring large numbers of citizens in your city?
> If you believe censorship is wrong, then it is equally wrong no matter what the topic is.
Are you agreeing with that view, or merely saying it’s a theoretical view but you think such believers are wrong?
Someone pointed out[1] a while ago that LLMs look good at things you are bad at. Which is I think one of the best explanations of why so many people disagree about how good they are at programming. There are a lot of people really bad at programming, and they will look at the output if an LLM and say “Wow, it’s so much better than my code!”
I've moved over to MacPorts due to Homebrew's aggressive support phase-out schedule[1]. My daily driver iMac is now in the Tier-3 "go away" bucket. Absolutely loved Homebrew for the short period of time I could use it, but I'm not going to get on the hardware update treadmill just to keep using it.
Nonsense. Everyone has values. "Make myself maximum money" is a value. "Amass maximum power over the world's information" is a value. It's clear Amodei certainly follows the latter, and I would soften the former somewhat for him; they did after all decline the Pentagon contract that would have made money but would have meant giving up some control of information.
Look, self-loathing is all the rage, but just because you don't understand what "values" mean doesn't mean you have to insult your entire country along with you.
As for making money, you're right, it's not one of your values. It takes a special case of main character syndrome to think it's not anyone's value.
The one they ended up going “well I guess we’ll contract with them after all”, after cleverly using their sort-of-refusal to gain a ton of goodwill and new customers?
No. You read the actual essay, then explain how we're supposed to interpret this more charitably:
Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should
be required to go through technical testing
and auditing, and their release should be
blocked or reversed as a threat to public
safety if they do not meet high standards
of safety. I am grateful to see the Trump
administration’s Executive Order move
incrementally towards a greater role for
government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal
recommends even further action.
They are all-but-literally sucking up to the administration that declared their company a supply-chain risk, arguing that the same administration should be given gatekeeping authority over all high-quality LLMs including open-weight releases. Go gaslight somebody else.
I agree with your sentiment but not your conclusion. They don't want this administration specifically to have gatekeeping authority, what they want is any administration to say that they are gatekeeping, so that they can regulate the competition out of existence. Of course the actual checks and balances will be near pointless in effect, but expensive to implement nonetheless.
Of course the actual checks and balances will be near pointless in effect
My concern is that they won't be pointless in effect. Make no mistake: if Amodei has his way, possession of unvetted model weights will be treated like possession of CSAM is today. And at the same time Amodei calls for that, others are calling for the deployment of technical measures that will make it easier to enforce such laws.
All to the sound of thunderous applause on "Hacker News."
I’ve noticed that too many HN folks seem to think that cynicism makes them more intelligent. I think it must be some kind of insecurity, about not wanting to be seen as naive or something. It’s pretty sad though, I wonder how some of these people find any peace or joy in their lives.
Believing they have any interests other than theirs at heart is like believing the stripper is really in love with you. That's not cynicism, that's just common sense.
It's a very common failure mode amongst the chronically online. It's a way for people to feel superior over others - really, they're just depriving themselves of joy and the idea that good things can and do exist in the world.
You asked, I answered. The direct and immediate effect of Amodei getting what he asks for in that essay will be to empower the Trump administration to approve model releases.
I don't really agree with their point here, but there are plenty of people in the AI community whose views are aligned with Anthropic's. That doesn't make them shills.
It's actually important those views are put forward.
A place like LessWrong has the opposite problem - there is no one there who questions the "safety narrative" so the discussion swings more and more towards the extreme end of that spectrum.
I hate to accuse people of shilling (and HN hates those accusations as well, policy-wise). And there are ways to defend Amodei's point, or at least there would be if he and his friends hadn't been beating the same drum since GPT2.
But I tend to agree, just saying it's a "pretty reasonable statement" and leaving it at that is beyond the pale for anyone who doesn't have an undisclosed stake in the argument.
This is like the most milquetoast stance in the AI safety community. It's great the Trump admin did something, no one expected them to, and they should have done more. Very powerful tools released to the public should be regulated for safety.
That is "pretty reasonable" to most people (except the tech-libertarian crowd).
It's like we've all forgotten what technical debt means. We just say the phrase, but we have forgotten that it is analogous to actual debt. Every line of code produced should be treated as a liability to the company, like a bond they issued that they have to pay interest on in the future. You only take on the liability if it produces more business value than it costs to maintain. The goal is not to issue as many bonds as you possibly can.
The fact that a single person is "in charge" of the government, with the other two branches largely deferring all power to that one person, is a recent aberration from the norm in the USA. I'm for a single-payer health system that is administered by a well-checked regulatory apparatus and institutions that are not subject to wild policy swings at the whim of a single king-like leader.
>I'm for a single-payer health system that is administered by a well-checked regulatory apparatus and institutions that are not subject to wild policy swings at the whim of a single king-like leader
And I want to win the lottery, marry a princess, and for my childhood dog to come back to life.
We all want things.
When we're advocating for government changes we need to be realistic and make good choices. Right now throwing an enormous amount of power at a dysfunctional government (public health care) is an insane bid completely disconnected from reality.
We need people to care about the basic functionality of government and for it's various pieces to do their duty. They aren't, so maybe let's shelve the idea of handing over control of our healthcare to them until they can deal with their cowardice in front of an aspirational king.
At least elected governments are in theory accountable to the public through voting. Insurance companies and healthcare providers are not in any way accountable to the public, and the public has zero power (outside of regulation) to affect their actions. Just because public [X] is currently a bad choice doesn't make private, corporate [X] always a better choice.
Who cares about theory when the reality is a corrupt insane government was elected. We're not dealing with theory. Healthcare is too important to propose major changes based on theory instead of reality.
You DO have healthcare choices now. Consider the healthcare option provided when accepting a job is on the table, provide feedback to your employer about their chosen provider (i.e. say NO to United Healthcare). Even though it involves big life choices with private healthcare there ARE options on the table instead of what the electorate chooses every 2/4/6 years.
And people are pretty misguided. The typical HN crowd person would STILL HAVE private health insurance on top of the public care in almost any country today that has the public option. The public option is bad, slow, and has a habit of denying care. You'd be rich, you'd still want better care than what was available for free.
The most shocking thing about entering Software as a career was the enormous number of "Brillant Paula Beans"[1] that are out there silently working, doing meetings, participating in all the software rituals, but producing useless and ultimately scrapped work product.
Maybe "mission-chauffeured." Revenue/business model is in the driver's seat and the mission just comes along for the ride and adapts to wherever the car is going.
An entrepreneur I used to admire a great deal was once described to me this way: "So and so doesn't do what's right. He makes whatever he does right." Ever since I heard that phrase, I haven't been able to unsee it in so many founders who I think sincerely want to do the right thing, but their ego gets in the way.
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