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Comment by tripleee | Hacker News Reader

of course, but the safety angle was pushed from day one. I more mean the forethought of how it would play out

Ok but Dario has been thinking about AI Safety since 2016 [1], before even GPT-1. I think the simplest explanation is that the Anthropic folks genuinely believe what they say, it just happens to also help their business a lot.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565

Yeah I think this is right. The best setup is when a true belief aligns with a competitive moat.

I definitely believe that (to his credit!) Amodei is a true believer in safety. But I also think it was important for many of the deep pockets investors who have been involved in the company since early on to recognize that this would be a potentially defensible moat.

"True believer in safety" but happily quoting arse wipe Vance? Give me a break...

What was the quote? For what it's worth, I do really think that Amodei believes in and cares about safety. But that is not the same as believing that he is entirely altruistic or above the influence of politics.

That just shows how wrong he's been because there was nothing unsafe about AI in 2016. And the people theorizing about this stuff in the 20th century? I want to see what crazy code they were writing

Is it not better to anticipate problems for a technology so that we can develop theories and techniques to solve them ahead of time?

For instance, Amodei co-authored RLHF in 2017 [1], 5 years before it went on to be used to turn GPT-3 into ChatGPT.

[1]: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/d...

Does this really seem exceedingly clever and hard to foresee to you? To me, it seems like a pretty standard regulatory capture strategy.

This doesn't even mean that they're wrong about the risks or that they're lying. But surely all the investors understood this factor in their moat.

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