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Comment by ipdashc | Hacker News Reader

So what do you want them to do, then? Because I don't like it either, but they're right about their core tenet, which is that if they don't do it, someone else is going to. Even if we ignore the obvious other player in OpenAI, there's now dozens of labs in a handful of countries, the cat is thoroughly out of the bag.

Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it preachy and hypocritical? Yeah. And I've yet to hear anyone suggest something better.

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> And I've yet to hear anyone suggest something better.

While I reject their basic premise and think it is more marketing garbage, the answer sure as shit isn’t to try to monopolize the technology so that Anthropic can extract maximum rents from it.

Right. Five years ago the idea was you needed the capitalism to fund compute/training. Now, its clear that open weight models could be a public good. If my PC takes my job I'm still empowered and can still capture that value, so if Anthropic were pursing that end it wouldn't seem so hypocritical.

> if they don't do it, someone else is going to

If I don’t rob my neighbour, someone else is going to do it

No, not really?

Keeping building models and tools. Sending out missionaries to speed along the process of job displacement is an unnecessary side quest.

Bingo!

Continue building useful models, tooling and products, market them to the people who could benefit and be realistic about their strength and weaknesses. Drop the messaging about job displacement, "transformative/dangerous AI", "significant disruptions" and "unprecedented abundance". They are the ones pushing and funding this narrative; just look at the phrasing in this announcement. And it's percolating down everywhere in the general public leading to AI psychosis.

They are proposing solutions to a hypothetical problem they are actively trying to manifest into reality to get more capital and funding.

That's what hypocritical about it. Not the development of the technology nor the effort to lobby for more regulations and policies.

The general discourse around AI could be much more sensible and pragmatic and lead to a more balanced, healthy rollout of the technology in society. But of course this means forfeiting at least part of the massive injection of capital in those companies and the ecosystem in the short-term.

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