I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, and upstream a minor bug in and erlang/OTP ssh key implementation with Opus in maybe 20 minutes (+2 weeks or so for upstream). It is not impossible that I could have done this before, but it would have taken days or weeks. The actual fix was about 2 lines of code, hardly AI slop, but getting there would have been quite the slog, and I never would have done it.
There is a lot of the reason for AI skepticism out there, but people tend to do massive overcorrections and underestimate the force multiplier it can be, particularly for people with some idea of what they're doing and a good grasp of how to take advantage of the tool.
So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity.
Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.
Are we really saying that Anthropic claiming AI would take over industries was some benevolent ethical move rather than marketing their product as a cheap replacement for human labor that works in any industry? Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead?
Oppenheimer believed that technological progress is inevitable: if something can be built it will be.
Anthropic (and Deepmind, and some at OpenAI) believe the same thing.
Their ethical argument is:
1) This technology is coming whether or not our company does it or not.
2) Strong AI needs to be under human control, and we are the best placed to develop techniques to make this happen.
To be very clear: Anthropic (at least) is very happy to restrict access to their best models. They have continually campaigned for regulation to make sure others have to do the same.
> Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead
Personally I strongly reject the idea that labor displacement is unethical.
It will be a serious problem to deal with, but that doesn't make it unethical.
The steam engine displaced labor. That doesn't make it unethical.
What are those to be created jobs going to be doing that AI won't be able to?
There's two big differences with the steam machine: this change is happening much faster so society has much less time to adapt, and it's got a much wider scope. Steam machines only replaced a small category of jobs.
Be specific, what are you talking about. Industry has been continuously warning about many of the complex problems that are going to happen as a clear consequence of the technology. I don’t know of any problem they have talked about that hasn’t either already come to fruition in one sense or another or that just hasn’t yet arrived. Dario has been predicting the end of coding for a long time now and look where we already are.
So yea no it’s more like it’s important for industry leaders and those closest to model development to proactively identify the issues that they don’t have complete control over or that we don’t have a regulatory framework for.
Super puzzling to see these comments and of course with zero specifics just “they’re all liars and grifters”
I'm talking about the breathless alarmism that Dario and his company push out as a marketing strategy. They've given us such gems as these:
- "It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea" (from the company that can't go more than a day or two without serious downtime)
- "We are releasing a model that is too powerful for the public"
- "It would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development."
- "I believe that biological risks may soon follow, and that serious AI autonomy risks may not be far behind."
You can fill my ear with nitpicks about there still being time for these cries of wolf to be born out, but be prepared for me to wax philosophical about all things being possible given an eternal timescale.
> Dario has been predicting the end of coding for a long time now and look where we already are.
Where? It seems exceedingly unlikely that developers have all been phased out while I wasn't looking, as Dario prognosticated. And even if they all up and disappeared, AI still hasn't found a toehold outside of the relatively niche market of agentic coding.
The issue is both OpenAI and Anthropic have lied so many times that it’s no longer rational to take anything they say at face value.
Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast
Be specific, what do you consider their lies to be? Also, this is pretty straightforward. You have a decade of extremely stable and predictable performance trajectory. It’s easy to see the writing on the wall. You can feel whatever which way about their motivations and ethics but if you read say Dario’s raw words they are pretty reasonable. We have to have a good regulatory framework and do what we can to prepare ourselves while also not ceding a critical strategic advantage. The west coast is always cult like, that’s not new. And it ignores the very real substance to the discussion.
Every year since 2023 the models are too dangerous to release and in 12 months all white collar jobs will be obsolete. This might not have been a deliberate lie but it's clearly been untrue and they've said it again and again.
Predictions with wrong timing are frankly worthless. I predict at some point in the future the S&P 500 will be at 10,000. Of course I'm guaranteed to be right. But have I really predicted anything useful?
If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do.
And if you want to ask if Altman is trustworthy... ask Satya Nadella or anyone else who's ever made the mistake of doing business with him
I think that Anthropic is fully absolutely unethical. And they lied a lot. They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.
If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
It really does not matter how much they believed own doom predictions, because they were actively trying to make them true whether realistic or not.
> They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.
These words make no sense. Anthropic delayed mythos/fable rollout. A mythos model without safeguards would have been a pretty bad idea, and they sacrificed a ton of revenue and risked being scooped by any of the other labs in the meantime. Frontier models are only frontier temporarily until the next lab releases their model. Of course they are a company and need to act in their own best interest.
It is also clearly serious the problems we need to think about as we march quickly towards even more capable systems. Why on earth is it a problem to point this out?
> If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
What a really weird take; they employ some of the best safety and alignment teams in the industry and this is an active area of research that they are campaigning for more attention on. You complain about them “doom trolling” and then complain they don’t do anything about…the doom? No sense at all.
It is perfectly consistent to (1) sound an alarm and (2) March full steam ahead as quickly as they can. If they don’t do (1) that’s unethical. If they don’t do (2) someone else will. I would rather someone like Dario align these models than the CCC. Plus it would be nice not to have a war over Taiwan which is inevitable if China gains enough of the upper hand in this AI race.
The point I'm trying to make is Anthropic's marketing about broad security risk related to the capability of its models is a valid concern though their dog and pony show really overdid it, probably to the detriment of us all for many reasons. It is indeed amplifying the abilities of people to find and exploit security issues.
The point of my anecdote is I was able to identify and fix an at least security adjacent bug in a language I could charitably consider myself a novice in. It happened to very unlikely have a security impact, but that was mere chance. LLMs expand the pool of people able to find and exploit security problems and we're all considerably more vulnerable as a result.
The biggest security threat was always someone bored with $20, a lot of attacks could be ignored or at least not prioritized with that threat model. This isn't true any more and our attack surface has gotten a whole lot larger.
OP described a simple 2-line fix that would have been annoying to find by hand. That's a matter of heuristic search. The majority of problems in software engineering do not fall in this category.
More than low hanging fruit, I think it would have been legitimately hard to find. It only triggered 1/512 runs and probably would have required some expertise in crypto algorithms.
BUT regardless, pruning low hanging fruit for any task IS a force multiplier. So much of so many tasks are easy but tedious. Finding libraries, documentation not matching code thus reading code, correct syntax/arguments, and just tons of straightforward tasks which are not HARD but time consuming.
Find it yourself. On any recently released erlang create an ssh server with their library. With the only available post-quantum algorithm connect to the server 1,000 times. You should get one or two key exchange failures (1/512 chance to fail)
There is a lot of the reason for AI skepticism out there, but people tend to do massive overcorrections and underestimate the force multiplier it can be, particularly for people with some idea of what they're doing and a good grasp of how to take advantage of the tool.