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Comment by ryaniscool | Hacker News Reader

I find all of the virtue signalling from AI companies exhausting.

It's interesting how we dismiss anyone caring about things other than profit as virtue signally. Anthropic was founded by people who seemed to legitimately care about AI safety. It's possible the current conglomeration that is the company doesn't, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume that.

It's possible that they have the best intentions but are woefully misguided, like pretty much the average sv techno-optimist.

The market will decide if that's right.

I rest my case

If Anthropic truly cared about AI safety, then they wouldn't put customers in states of uncertainty about monopolistic legal terms buried amidst verbose documents commanding customers to enforce Anthropic legal terms for them AFTER they leak harmful information.

Not only is Anthropic anti-open-source, they're also anti-open-output.

Saying "Hey, try our product! It can do everything!" while ALSO saying, "Sorry, you're not allowed to use our general intelligence product to compete with general intelligence..." just evidences no upper IQ bound on Dunning-Kruger

Calling something virtue signaling is not a dismissal of people caring about things other than profit. It's a statement of belief that they don't actually care about things other than profit and are just pretending that they do. There's a pretty clear financial incentive to virtue signal since getting the benefit of the doubt from society lets them make more profit with less scrutiny. There's also no benefit for society to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're being genuine.

Yes I agree that's the intent, but I think it can often be used by people who think the thing being "virtue" signaled about isn't important. People who think that corporations aren't going far enough in support of their social issue sometimes accuse them of virtue signally, but people opposed to people viewing the issue as important do all the time.

The prevailing wisdom on Hacker News now is that actually people who say they care about AI safety are mostly lying and any road blocks they try to put up are motivated by greed. It feels very much like someone accusing a company talking about responsible forestry and advocating for higher standards in the forest cutting business of virtue signaling

The danger there is that the phenomenon of throwing up roadblocks that are purely motivated by greed but are claimed to be for good reasons is common enough that we've got a phrase for it - regulatory capture. If the belief is that these companies are actually simply not motivated by anything other than pure greed, which I don't think is unreasonable, then it's also not unreasonable to be skeptical of any roadblocks they propose. Responsible forestry is a pretty great example actually - not that there's regulatory capture there, but in terms of it being an industry that pretends that it's planting forests and restoring ecosystems while actually taking rich, dynamic ecosystems and turning them into biodiversity-free monoculture tree farms. But the branding of 'forest' means people think it's something other than miles of high density monoculture agrigulture of neat, soulless rows of trees. And if those companies began talking about 'higher standards' in forest cutting, I'd pretty much immediately want to dig into who they're trying to lock out of the market, if it was some sort of protectionist thing, etc.

Are you assuming that anyone claiming to be doing good things must be lying? And then getting angry at them both for not doing the good thing and for the lying?

That does sound exhausting.

If they're assuming they're lying, and then the good thing doesn't happen proving they've lied, then that might be exhausting, but they'd also be correct lol. You're allowed to be angry at things that suck about the world.

I think "AI safety" deserves an eye-roll. AI doesn't allow people to break the laws of physics or travel in time. Safety as presented by Anthropic and OpenAI, is just AI companies playing favorites with which industry gets to use some powerful software tools.

You're defending a company that makes "safe" usage part of their brand and every press release mentions how much they care about safety. Then one day, they announce they are making some compromises to their safety policy so they can get large new customers (government) but don't worry all they care about is safety. It's comical how predictable this was.

They have to do it for recruitment's sake. Enough of the talent they need live in Ivory Tower land where the base world-model / philosophy is super far to the progressive direction vs those Americans who work in industry.

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