Policy on the AI Exponential

slopinthebag

How predictable. The company currently on top wishes to use the regulatory power of the state to prevent competitors from encroaching on their market dominance. It’s a tail as old as time, although their CEO’s rarely publish blog posts about it.

themafia

> AI models have gone from barely being able to write a coherent line of code to writing most of the code at major AI companies. Gasoline has gone from barely being able to power stationary farm machines to now being the fuel that underpins our entire economy. So, great news all around, right? > which predict an exponential increase And was that actually delivered? Real question: If a model goes from 80% accurate to 85% accurate is that an exponential increase in "cognitive capabilities?" Are we considering training costs and effort?

pdhborges

What will be Amodei's job after we have AIs that are better at evrything than humans? Is the AI going to care about our stock exchange playgrounds that reward the future Antropic stock holders?

tripleee

My god this guy is insufferable. Stop mis-using the term exponential

SkitterKherpi

It is impressive how well they've scheduled all their releases, posts, and other news to dominate the tech news cycle almost every day in this pre-IPO phase.

Imnimo

>The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. This power must be scoped to the above four specific risks and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions. I feel significantly less sympathy for Anthropic's Supply Chain Risk designation if they believe the government should have this power over them. You get what you sign up for.

ofjcihen

Can we not open up every article talking to working professionals as if they’re children? I like to stay up to date on things but more and more I’m finding myself pointing codex at a URL and saying “get to the point”.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Sit back and watch the stock market implode as these lot double down on safety theatre. The hype is coming to an end.

SilverElfin

I have to be honest, I am tired of reading these arrogant, self-absorbed posts from Dario and Anthropic in general. Opening with this lord of the rings reference just feels like they are trying too hard and are untrustworthy. As annoying as their tone is, the real big danger is what they are setting up for. All this fear-mongering around Mythos, the overly aggressive controls on Fable, and these manifestos they keep writing, are part of setting up for REGULATORY CAPTURE. Even collaborating with the Pope and the Interfaith Alliance ( https://iafsc.org/our-work/faith-ai-covenant ) are part of creating a vast support network for regulations and restrictions. Those regulations will help those faith organizations or the government or whatever, but will also help Anthropic’s bottom line. Those regulations will not support your civil liberties. They will restrict speech, access to AI, and allowed uses of AI. They will lead to bans on use of models from some countries like China, and also bans on open-source or open-weight models. If Dario wants to be trusted, he needs to explicitly say in writing that Anthropic will not support any legal or regulatory restrictions on open-source AI, open-weight AI, or Chinese models. Otherwise, what he is really saying - even as he claims he is trying to ‘defend democracy’ - is that he and Anthropic do not truly support fundamental rights like our right to speech. It’s not just Anthropic either. OpenAI had their own recent polemic, pushing for regulations like mandatory safety reviews by agencies for “frontier” models ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48387246 ). It’s a dead giveaway that these companies have no moats, are in serious danger of being a commodity, and are now in the process of using regulations and enshittification to hold onto money and power.

kouteiheika

> AI companies that develop advanced AI models must have strong security standards that protect their model weights So, basically, make open-weight models illegal. It's nice for Dario to come out and say this so explicitly.

iamniels

I like that he comes up with new laws and regulations for AI companies. Can I suggest some more? - You shall not embed copyrighted material in your models. - You shall not bombard every little website in existence with 1 million scraping queries per day. - You shall not use your political influence to pump and dump your AI (or rocket?) company. - You shall not imperill the whole IT sector by buying all CPU and memory chips. These new rules will affect every society directly in a positive way. Thanks.

snaking0776

I know this is likely just for IPO hype but when I read things like this I sometimes wonder if I must be missing something. I use agents everyday and find them really useful and they save me a lot of headache. At the same time I find that if I let it self-direct at a high level at all it generally makes bad choices that cause me headaches later so I can’t really give them autonomy. Enough people seem to believe this exponential line of thinking though that I keep having to wonder: am I the one missing something here? Is there some magic tool that I haven’t found yet that will cure cancer?

advael

It's crazy how all these tech CEOs develop the same sense of ethics that seeks to make the foundation of open research and development that made their efforts possible and may threaten their market position illegal in the name of safety against nebulously-defined risks

d_silin

The only effective action is push back on Athropic.

TobyTheCamel

I feel completely baffled by the other responses on this thread. People viewing this purely as a marketing stunt, regulatory capture or attack on their freedoms, with seemingly no appreciation of the real threat that AI could pose to society and even humanity given its current rate of progress. I'm not going to claim that the CEO of pre-IPO company has no incentive to bolster the claims of his tech, but to completely disregard everything he is saying based on that seems awfully binary. I don't know whether people are just high on copium, spouting "it's just fancy autocomplete" or "only humans can really be creative" on every LLM-related thread, but it is impossible to deny that in a span of a few years we've gone from models that could barely put together a sentence, to something maybe not equivalent to a junior developer, but at least resembling it. And sure, you can point out every flaw that current day LLMs have, just how everyone pointed out that Stable Diffusion couldn't generate accurate hands (until it could 6 months later!). But the gradient is pretty clear and I am yet to see a well-argued narrative from anyone why scaling laws should fail in the next year or two (by which point it feels like we're going to have a real problem, extrapolating the current trajectory). I'm very glad this discussion is at least being had, and I wish everyone would get off their high-horse and take things a bit more seriously.

anothermathbozo

> A wide range of pro-employment policy incentives can help to slow or reduce job displacement, including: wage insurance policies that compensate people when they have to take a lower-paying job, retention tax incentives to encourage employers not to make layoffs, workforce training grants, or infrastructure to facilitate matching of employers to employees to speed the rate of labor market adaptation. While the particulars of which interventions are best will depend on what kind of labor displacement AI brings, we should readily accept the costs and market inefficiencies that these policies could entail, particularly as they are likely to be offset by AI-driven productivity gains. People get income from one of three places: capital income, labor income, or the welfare state. If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state. Nothing new need be invented here. Dario’s long and only somewhat organized list of policy interventions makes appropriate preparedness sound like a manic pulling of any and all levers when a simple theory of distribution will suffice.

patcon

The comments here. They make me feel that we are so doomed. We all want to nuclear codes so badly. We are addicted to intelligence and labour so badly that we simply can't concieve that a pro-social actor might want us all not to have it, and for good reason. I mean... Obviously, insiders like Oppenheimer (who dedicated their lives to considering the implications of the technology under discussion), they just feared nuclear proliferation because they wanted all the profits for themselves, right :(

thefounder

This guy can’t stay a day without posting something more or less “ban open source AI”. We keep you safe

tetrisgm

Honest question: is there a reason for the naming conventions for these models? Anything that makes it better than giving them names with model numbers, like “Claude 3” or such?

jampekka

"Democracies should seek to form a global coalition centered on building AI according to their common values, iteratively trying to draw in the rest of the world by making it more and more attractive to be part of the coalition and less and less attractive to be outside it." It's not clear to me on which side of the coalition USA is meant to be in this divide. And as an European I'm not sure whether being in China's or USA's coalition is better in the long term. In general, this deliberate mongering of ever more geopolitical division is extremely harmful. As is the Trump bootlicking.