It is normal, expected, and healthy for stakeholders in a regulatory environment to offer proposals about regulations. What's unhealthy is the proposition that the deliberation process is so fragile that a stakeholder needs to cover every angle, lest they corrupt the outcome.
The Debts and Engagements Clause of article VI of the US constitution was kind of a weird little thing to stick in there, but like, it was important to a lot of people at the time and probably helped move the needle to get the thing ratified.
Trustbusting should absolutely be included as well. One of the biggest immediate threats is the concentration of wealth into a very tiny number of companies.
DMCA-style fines should be retroactively + prospectively applied to copyrighted works reproduced by AI, paid for by the AI companies, paid out to the copyright holders whose work was used without permission.
It would not be prohibitively hard to do the math on this.
That would fix a lot of the problems with AI overnight, but it'll also never happen.
Dario's been beating the regulatory capture drum for several years at various intervals, always in the name of safety, but it's hard to not see how self-serving it is.
I'm personally very tired of reading the linear-algebra-median of every AI safety essay from lesswrong with the inserted opinion of "therefore all my competitors, especially those pesky open source ones from scary countries should be illegal, only I can be trusted to not abuse the computer god that I definitely will have in just a couple more releases and with a couple more trillion invested"
Its hard to read the first half of this as anything other than regulatory capture propaganda. It really all ties together as:
> AI has become a major commercial technology
>Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety
> AI companies that develop advanced AI models must have strong security standards that protect their model weights
Anyway Dario's financial interests aside. This is an interesting breakpoint for me.
> Second, any response to AI-driven job displacement needs to address both the need to provide for everyone economically, and the need for people to find meaning, purpose, and agency. The latter is ultimately more important
To me this reads as an out of touch statement. I think the majority of people on earth work to keep a roof over their heads. Of course work can be a source of meaning, purpose, and agency, but to call it the more important aspect on a societal level is a sort of rich person like Dario statement to make.
Can you explain how this is attempted regulatory capture? To start a lab now which can actually compete for the frontier (i.e. and pass the "Threshold of compute" needed to get regulated) a lab / company would need a ton of money. Surely a well funded operation of that kind can deal with the regulations.
For one thing, the financial barrier may not necessarily stay that high forever.
For another, such regulations could prevent a competitor from making the weights open for their model to try and disrupt the competition.
And finally, Amodei would no doubt want to be involved in designing the tests the AI needs to pass, and could (and likely would) design it in a way that Anthropic models would be able to pass easier than competing models.
You'd need a ton of money if you followed the unoptimized, cash burning mindset of existing AI labs. There's probably a ton of optimization that is just sitting on the table. Chinese labs have proven it can be done for way less money.
Then there's running inference service of open weights, which doesn't necessarily require opening a lab. You can grab Chinese model weights and sell inference.
Anthropic wants to make sure nobody can open a new domestic lab, or provide inference services of unauthorized open weight models, or release open weights if model is good. It is regulatory capture - it covers all areas that are dangers to Anthropic's bottom line.
Well he explicitly calls for regulations that ban open weight models, which of course hugely threaten Anthropic's API business model. If we got a open weight model actually around as good as Opus 4.6 that would be extremely bad for them.
Dario is also huge on regulations banning Chip exports to China, who are the only other real competitors to US Labs, open weight or not.
Also invariably, such corporations always create regulations that are easier for them and harder for competitors.
> 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.
This and we already did a dry run of ad-hoc distributions with COVID relief. They had to use the data from tax filings but it did work in terms of getting the money out there.
> 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.
This isn't guaranteed in the tax system as it exists today, because reinvestments into further growth are often treated as expenses which cancel out the income for tax purposes.
No I'm not? Current American tax policy does not guarantee that any fixed percentage of the national income will be received by the government as revenue. If the advent of powerful AI pushes corporations away from dividends and buybacks towards expansion and research, then tax revenues may flatten or even decrease even as the national income spikes. (Sales taxes are more likely to track aggregate economic activity, but US sales taxes are both not very high and don't flow to the federal government.)
> As a company, Anthropic always does as much as it can to work with customers to find creative new use cases and new sources of revenue that allow them to do more with their existing workforce, rather than focusing solely on cost savings (which often means reducing the workforce).
Without direct workforce or policymaker representation on the boards of private entities, the private sector will seek to maximize shareholder value even if that means workforce reductions.
It's not clear that any country could realistically ensure that incredibly powerful industries/private sector entities operate perfectly aligned with national interests, short of nationalization.
Large tech companies are already quasi-state actors. In theory, international law and regulations can be binding and enforceable. We see how well that works in practice.
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?
What did your AI-assisted workflow look like 1 year ago? I can only speak for myself, but I would carefully specify a class or module in great detail and then hand it off to the model to implement, then carefully review the result.
How about 2 years ago? Back then, I wouldn't even trust it to write a 5-line function without making some sort of silly mistake.
Today, I can leave an agent running by itself for 20 or 30 minutes and most of the time, it comes back with a result that's either flawless or can be refined to be good with a few back and forth messages. Maybe I still have to make some high-level decisions ahead of time, but all of the details, including exploring the codebase and figuring out what to do based on that, can be left to the agent. The amount of improvement just in the last 2 years has been staggering.
Now extrapolate how things will look if the trend continues for another 2 or 3 years.
Is this guaranteed to happen? No. But people have been predicting that we're going to hit a wall for a long time now, and we haven't yet. Maybe there's a wall just ahead of us. But maybe there's not -- and the "not" case seems likely enough that we should at least be planning for it.
If we already were at the point that AI could self-direct effectively, then the world would already be very different (eg AI-driven technological progress and unemployment) in a way that we might have wished we prepared for more.
Do you mean policy-wise (like Dario is talking about), or more broadly?
I wonder about broad preparedness, but unfortunately there's not a lot that we "normal" people can do to prepare. Hoard savings and food? Learn physical trades?
You're talking quite statically though. I don't think anyone is worried about today's models being a serious threat, but next year's, three years' time? Just three years' ago these models were useful bumbling fools and it's hard to judge where on the S-curve we currently are.
I'd rather be thinking about these issues in advance rather than waiting until the problem becomes real.
> I don't think anyone is worried about today's models being a serious threat
Fable is essentially bricked for my areas of interest (even being a member of the cybersecurity program). It seems like they’re attempting to sell regulatory capture under the guise of safety. That’s more of the point.
It's a clever argument because if you question it, you're reminded of the entire history of technological development which is, guess what, exponential.
You're sometimes also dismissed as not understanding the concept of exponentials. This again is clever, as it's baked into the definition that if you don't see it happening, or can't imagine it happening, well that's precisely a tell you're living through an exponential!
All the reasons you might give can be countered with, essentially, "that problem that seems clear today will go away sooner than you can imagine and when it does you'll be on the back foot, so you'd better just assume it will go away and project/plan accordingly".
The trick is entirely that one cannot possibly deny the general power of exponential progress across all of technology, it's almost a law, but it doesn't work in the other direction - no particular local technology is owed exponential growth because of this general pattern. Sometimes things just cap out at merely 'useful' and don't improve much further, no matter how much you want to believe they won't, no matter how steep the progress curve (or, indeed, line) has been up to that point.
To this point the narrative of what these tools can do over these last 3 or 4 years has always been way ahead of the reality. Everyone who works with the tools knows this.
Not everyone wants it to be true, so some will not acknowledge it and will just keep pushing this year-ahead projection as ground truth today. Many (not all) of those people aren't builders, so they don't have to deal with present reality jarring up against this projection of what ought to be possible, they're safe just talking about what should hypothetically be possible and making plans around that that won't be executed for months to years anyway. This keeps the flywheel going, and in fairness, some of the reality has actually caught up in certain ways, so some of those plans will have to some degree worked out which spins the flywheel faster still.
In the end though I just keep thinking: it's been 4 years (as referenced in the post). A lot has happened, the tools are very cool and very useful for certain things. But when I put my head up and look around in the world, even just the software world, nothing's really changed in terms of actual outcomes, in terms of new things appearing or being built that didn't exist 4 years ago. Certainly nothing feels instinctively like it's improved much, subjectively.
Maybe this is what it feels like to be in the knee of a curve of an exponential, but it seems equally reasonable this is just a breakthrough that's kind of improving at a clip you'd expect it to for all the investment put in, but fundamentally is just a new tool that needs to be slowly commercialised in an economically rational way, as we gear up for the next breakthrough which may or may not be related. Who says it must just keep improving forever? This argument never made much sense to me.
It's nice that people are genuinely curious about this.
- All of your observations are absolutely dead on
- Yet, we have very very very robust scaling laws that as Dario points out we've had and validated for over a decade. This extends to downstream measures like METR time horizon and compsosite benchmarks like the epoch capability index.
- If you look at where you're at now, which is again dead on, you're looking at a point on a curve that is quite easy to extrapolate, but less easy to tell when exactly on the curve a certain capability or use case undergoes a step change from error rates dropping below a threshold that is hard to anticipate in advance.
So while Dario / other frontier CEOs are understandably unpalatable, they are absolutely spot on with a call out that all of this is bound to happen and happen quickly, and that's without solving several core problems that haven't been solved yet (e.g. continual learning). In 2023, coding agents were just laughable. Yet they followed the same predictable training curves. Anyone looking at the data can see the obvious, and anyone reading newspaper headlines or hacker news comments would get a very different impression.
Are we plotting against cost? How is the capability advancement vs dollars paid for development?
By my read of the (very sparse) data, we're getting linear improvements in capability for super-linear increases in costs. [1] Indicates that by 2027 models will cost $1 billon to train. Dario estimates that model runs will cost $10 billion in 2026 [2]. That to me indicates costs are potentially growing faster than capability. Maybe by quite a bit.
If the value prop of LLMs doesn't prove out, that won't last. I'm of the opinion there is no data that shows actual economic value being delivered by models. The best data shows that LLM use might be destroying value [3].
>By my read of the (very sparse) data, we're getting linear improvements in capability for super-linear increases in costs. [1] Indicates that by 2027 models will cost $1 billon to train. Dario estimates that model runs will cost $10 billion in 2026 [2]. That to me indicates costs are potentially growing faster than capability. Maybe by quite a bit.
This is true and well established.
As long as you get any improvement whatsoever, it is worth spending to train since it pays off during.
Imagine training was not $1 billion but $100 billion but the performance improved by just 10%. This is still worth it because you can squeeze out the profits across years and years right? The improvement is ever lasting.
> The best data shows that LLM use might be destroying value [3].
This is basically a conspiracy theory and if you really believed this, you should not have led with "How is the capability advancement vs dollars paid for development?" because if there were no value, it doesn't really matter how much you invest.
This is a very tech-focused message board, populated by mostly tech-insiders, so perhaps a little outside perspective will help people understand.
Tech people are following a religious belief system whose utopian promise is the all-powerful computer that will end all suffering. I once read an article in reason magazine from over 30 years ago about how an advanced computer in the future will bring everyone who has ever lived back from the deat and let them live in paradise. They were completely serious. Atheists reading this may object to my description of the tech belief system as religious, but I believe it is accuarte. The idea that tech is an imrpovement and will improve people's lives is believed as an act of faith. Tech has its own moral systems based on some form of libertarian progressivism. And in the future, through the inevitable scientific magic of exponential something, a computer will ascend to godhood and judge all mankind for their actions before allowing some into eternal paradise.
To what extent any of this is true is up for debate, but most west coast tech elite are actively working towards this future, and these are the ideas that drive them. It's hard to talk to them about it because this is their woldview, and they imagine everyone to believe what they do.
> Tech people are following a religious belief system whose utopian promise is the all-powerful computer that will end all suffering.
Uh, I don't really think that's anywhere close to an accurate characterization of most people here. Everyone, including Dario and any researcher at any frontier lab, knows the situation is quite scary and unprecedented. There are problems that will be solved and diseases that will be cured, but will we be living in an Orwellian universe? Will a rogue drone swarm find you cowing in your basement and murder you? I mean the technology for this is already mostly here, it's a matter of the willpower and budget to roll out something really evil.
The comment's question is about capabilities and why the discussion about capabilities often times is far removed from todays capabilities.
I dunno, I don't think an outside observer would be too hard-pressed to find the fervor with which some talk about the endless possibilities and miraculous works of AI to border on the cusp of religious.
Some people sure, but some people believe the earth is flat. What’s without a doubt is the impact AI has already had, something maybe 2 years ago was dismissed as religious fervor maybe. Statistics and robust measurements plus stable scaling laws make this pretty far from religious I would say.
While I do understand the risks, I don't understand the solution. Essentially, Dario is saying that powerful model weights can't be distributed (ban open weights), and governments should coordinate and agree on standards, and block any dangerous model from being used at all, with government deciding what dangerous means.
Okay, I don't understand how legitimate access is granted then. Surely, Dario isn't saying to ban Sonnet, because I can definitely make it do cyber harm, as most exploits that I've seen in the wild with my own eyes were trivial.
So the only way I see his proposal working is:
- No open weights, AI is centralized in the hands of few
- We get AI-FAA that sets the rules and monitors
- If I want to do a security scan of my codebase, I get a time and scope limited license from AI-FAA that I upload to claude that will allow it to run the security scan in cloud with their models - Claude Mythos Scanner(TM).
Dario's proposal ultimately requires that people lose direct access to inference via API. Is this why they've been building SaaS clones with AI bolted on?
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
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.
It's very hard those days to think of companies/people more arrogant than Anthropic/Dario, which is quite the achievement as the bar is very high.
If that arrogance was well placed at least you could somewhat excuse it, but the fact that it is so overtly hypocritical and based on false premises just makes it so much worse.
I read this essay, and it feels like lying behind a mask of moral responsibility and safety for humanity.
They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money?
Protect your own monopoly, protect your customers' regulations. They want strong regulation like the FAA to raise barriers to entry for the foundation models they themselves build, but then why do they want to loosen FDA regulations? While at the same time driving token consumption from their own customers.
They talk about permanent job displacement and UBI. I usually call this "a morally packaged safe landing."
They are doing something unpopular (destroying jobs) and getting criticized for it. But they do not want to be criticized further, and they want to ask for social sympathy. So they claim a 'noble cause' that everyone can sympathize with and that is safe for themselves
AI will generate astronomical productivity gains and capital profits, which AI companies privatize. So why should the social costs be paid by national taxes? In my opinion, something like "We will donate all of our AI companies' revenue for the next 10 years to society" would show genuine sincerity.
Then they say, if we do not develop AI, China will eat our lunch, and they go after China. But is not this really about preventing Chinese dumping, maintaining our own token prices, and asking the world to beat down China so that they can preserve global tech hegemony?
But by blocking China from the CUDA ecosystem, now the CANN ecosystem has emerged, has it not? If China develops techniques that reliably reduce inference costs, who knows how things will turn out then.
Honestly, I like Anthrpic's Claude, but the Anthropic CEO's rhetoric is so stale. It is not that it feels hypocritical. It is that this is just a one dimensional rhetorical tactic that assumes the public is stupid.
I do not think open source is unconditionally good. (It is good, but it can become bad in all situations or all countrie). Open source itself is a barrier for countries outside the Anglosphere when they want to release IT products. Because there is no incentive to buy a product that is worse than an open source alternative. So I do not think everything necessarily has to be open source.
But this (referring to Anthropic's position) seems to treat people like fools. If regulation is needed, shouldn't they also argue that FDA regulation is needed? I wish they would be consistent
> They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money?
Training frontier AI models costs money, orders of magnitude more than third-party audits. If you can afford to build the model, you can afford to have it audited.
Regarding regulation: I'm deeply invested in computer vision systems and i fear that policymakers [who are not deeply familiar with the technical distinctions between AI systems] may write broad rules that cover "AI" generally. In that case, computer vision companies and industrial users could end up subject to requirements that were largely motivated by concerns about generative AI and LLMs.
> A nation that possesses powerful AI facing one without it—or even facing one that is behind in AI by 3 years—could be the equivalent of an army of World War II Marines facing an army of medieval swordsmen.
This is a somewhat ironic take from someone who very publicly feuded with the US government about whether their AI could be used for waging war.
>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.
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?
> after we have AIs that are better at evrything than humans.
That this is worded so definitively is a testament to the success of the AI industry. The idea that LLMs will be "better at evrything than humans"[sic] is far from certain.
I suspect that if someone does invent a machine like this, it won't look like a 2026 LLM, and it will be far far in the future. everybody relax.
Well obviously he'll have the AI 'dispose' of the poor and live a life as a king with a select few farmed humans and have the world as a play thing.
Really the entire future of AI at this point seems like "Don't worry about it, we'll figure out when we get there". Works a lot better if you're extremely rich and can afford your own private security.
Even loyal security would hardly be sufficient. If a million people have decided they want your head on a pike, even a billionaire cannot afford a big enough army. And what exactly is a billionaire in that world anyway?
Can't find the article mentioning it but apparently it's an open problem they're thinking about.
But yeah if society collapses these billionaire nerds are the first to go. Quietly, in their bunkers, while the team leader of their seal mercenary team takes over.
Even before the rest of us realizes what's happening.
> Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
Ooof a Yann LeCun quote from '24, a risky time period to be mining his quotes from lol. But I think broadly he's right, but the argument is: we don't see any evidence for the curve flattening, and we should plan for it _not_ to flatten any time soon. "It will eventually slow down" is true but its meaningless if you dont put any sort of time period on this.
>> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.
> Members of the trusted coalition should freely share chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) with each other, while working together to deny it to adversaries. US export controls on frontier chips and SME to China have been a major contributor to the US’s overall lead in AI, and these policies need to be expanded, tightened, and coordinated with other likeminded states.
I understand why Dario thinks this is crucial, but it's a very dystopian view of the medium-term future.
I'm not an optimist to the point that I believe that AI will lead to global Star Trek-style utopia (although it theoretically could), but ongoing disparity between "allied" and "enemy" powers relating to hardware technology and software models is both not really possible to enforce in the long term, and a pretty dismal state of global affairs even if successful.
I'd be interested in an expert geopolitical opinion on what the long tail of this would really look like in any sort of reasonable reality.
I appreciate the critical perspective on political and economic power, as long as it's consequently followed, and every willingness for cooperation and the creation of fair rules is good.
What makes me doubt that Dario Amodei has really internalized the problem is the lack of humility, the stance that it's just important that the "good guys" keep the technology away from the "bad guys".
If you really want to provide AI with public benefit, you need to prevent power concentration. How? Some unpolished ideas, I'd be happy to hear yours:
- Avoid getting too close to an administration that is openly attacking democracy and is not interested in the benefit of humanity or mutually beneficial cooperation.
- Don't support surveillance. Non-(US-)Americans have human rights and privacy, too. Prepare for a situation where a government tries to convert your compute infrastructure into surveillance infrastructure.
- Support the creation of community data centers. In other words, build data centers together with local communities and make sure they profit from them.
- Advocate for laws that require transparency about resource usage and emissions of data centers.
- If you don't want an AI race, make sure that other countries don't need to fear the US concentrating too much power. Create institutions that can be trusted by other countries, too.
EDIT: I forgot:
- If qualified labor will actually turn out to get devalued, we also need a plan to prevent states from turning into rentier states that don't depend on a well-educated society any longer.
(On the other hand, I have been fooled by too many billionaires claiming to act in the interest of democracy and freedom. I once fell for a billionaire buying a social media platform, claiming to be a free speech fundamentalist, and it didn't age too well.)
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.
In terms of aeronautics, went from the Wright brothers to the moon in 40 years. After that, everyone understandably thought that we'd be living in space and flying everywhere with personal jet packs in another couple years. Little did they know, it was the top of the S-curve, not the middle.
In the 60 years since, we've barely been able to adapt the 737 to fly longer routes.
Sure, I have no doubt that AI progress will follow an S-curve. The question is, where are we on it and is the plateau at a level safe for humanity? That's a very difficult thing to estimate without a crystal ball and not a risk I want to take.
I agree that AI poses a threat to society. I act on this by not developing world-leading AI models and offering them to anyone willing to pay top dollar, while funneling that money back into accelerating AI capabilities. Maybe Dario would consider taking a similar ethical position? Maybe he would support restrictions and taxes on data center construction, in order to slow down the pace?
If Anthropic were not developing these models, one of many other companies would be. I think it's good that the CEO of the current world-leader is at least considering these discussions and platforming possible solutions.
The fact that he doesn't support more restrictive approaches that don't align with his incentives doesn't invalidate the points he is making.
Or simply we use AI and see on the ground what it can and can't do. I can generally trust an agent for solved problems, but the more something deviates from established industry standards (i.e. what was relentlessly scraped) I have an increasingly harder time not having constant oversight of what it's doing, no matter the specs I put on the md.
Personally I feel most of the improvement in the last year comes from tooling/integration (MCPs, realtime documentation access, treesitter support, orchestration) than from the models themselves, in the last year. And still frontier models would routinely come up with bs until you tell them to actually use those tools.
You're talking as if this is a static thing though. It's the God of Gaps [1] but for humanity's special sauce.
Two years ago, I couldn't trust an LLM to do anything that wasn't straight forward boiler plate.
One year ago, I was pretty solid at writing algorithms that were combinations of existing ideas.
Now, Fable is outputting stuff that I would genuinely consider to be creative and original if a colleague had presented it to me.
Yes, maybe the code style still isn't great, but given the pattern of the last few years, it feels correct (a priori) to assume that this gap isn't going to keep closing.
> I'm not going to claim that the CEO of pre-IPO company has no incentive to bolster the claims of his tech
I am going to say it. The CEO of a pre-IPO company has extreme incentive to bolster the tech he is selling, to the point where his every action should be viewed as only in service to that goal. Every word he says should be viewed critically through that lense. He is not making this post out of the goodness of his heart, he is doing it in service to the IPO. If it happens to align with your views that's great, but it's still just a marketing stunt to get people with your views to buy in. Don't be fooled. Buy in if you feel it's a good deal, not because of the CEO's marketing.
It’s a guy asking to make an end-run around the constitution and the APA regulatory framework based on a flimsy sci fi premise. Naturally it provokes a negative reaction.
Why are they not preaching for protected weights, but public, ie, under state control? What do you feel his posture will be if that is starting to be discussed?
Also, on an unrelated note, why would you have an account for 5 years and only now post your second comment? AI has been an existential threat for years, why only now?
This is a pattern I am seeing all over the place on HN in the last year in AI threads, and I have to admit that I am starting to become paranoid and my feels need some assuaging.
Your first point is very reasonable, and I agree that that is something Dario would likely be more opposed to.
However, my point isn't that I think Dario is our saviour who we should follow the every word of. As with everyone, his opinions should be filtered through the lens of his incentives. That said, I don't understand the knee-jerk reaction by many commenters to completely disregard the many important points he's making.
As for the lack of my account use, I can't comment for others, but I'm just quite shy. I've opened up the comment box many times to write a reply but rarely commit to actually posting it, especially because I feel like I'm not on the side of the general HN consensus.
Genuinely, thank you. This is very encouraging and makes me feel much better about commenting more going forwards.
The quality of discussion and prose on HN is just generally so high that it can feel quite a bit intimidating to jump in (in contrast to Reddit where I have no worries about commenting haha).
Humans just aren't very good at dealing with threats that aren't immediate concerns. 'Safety regulations are written in blood' is a saying for a reason. A significant chunk of the population shrugs off climate change, and nearly all fertility rate crises threads are filled with dumb 'hurr lower population good' and/or 'See what Capitalism gets you!' rhetoric - They fundamentally don't even understand what the problem is. So is it really all that surprising that a technology like this would be shrugged off until it's too late ? Especially one with such existential issues for humanity? Some people are still too loathe to admit the clearly intelligent machine is intelligent, devolving into increasingly nonsensical and absurd (and ironically more human demeaning) arguments as model capabilities get better. I'm afraid you're asking for too much.
It's denialism, same as climate change, the subconscious fear to really grapple with the actual "what if" alternative scenario. Anthropic are true believers. They got to $1T in 5 years by being exceptionally smart and ahead of the curve here. Meanwhile HN just continually devolves into reactionary cynicism. "must be marketing, they just want to be rich, impossible AI advances much further." Meanwhile at every step of the way, Anthropic and X-riskers / "doomers" are vindicated in their correct predictive beliefs. We're headed to a future far dangerous than nukes very soon. We're in an arms race to detonate one 100x the size
"AI is advancing at a lightning pace—in only four years, 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. Similar gains have been made in biology, physics, math, finance, law, translation, and many other fields."
This is a massive exaggeration. The advancement in the automation of computer code writing has been impressive and is obviously, at least in the short term, changing the software engineering industry substantially. Most other fields have not been affected to nearly the same degree. Certainly not biology, physics, finance, and law (I don't know enough about the math and translation fields to speak to those).
---
"3. Accelerating AI’s positive impact..."
This whole section is the type of thing that often comes out of the mouths of Silicon Valley tech executives without a pharma background. It indicates a thorough lack of understanding of the realities of pharmaceutical research. What he is describing here is removing many of the solid, evidentiary rules that are in place to make sure that the drugs reaching the market actually work and replacing them with proxy predictions. Look, my least favourite part of the job is the animal testing, and I would be hugely grateful if that could be eliminated from the drug discovery pipeline. People have been trying to do that for a long time. But it's extremely difficult. Biology is very, very complicated. Our understanding of how processes in organisms work are vague and approximative. This is not computer code. Even if Anthropic somehow got all of Big Pharma to hand them their proprietary data, it would only scratch the surface of the understanding that is needed to solve these kind of problems. Due to these realities, the program Amodei is describing here would, effectively, open a floodgate of drugs on the market that don't actually do what they are supposed to and are more likely to have unidentified toxicity.
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?
Each of the nouns is a “size class” in literature. From small lines poem (haiku, sonnet) to larger story (fable) to very large story (opus) to culture-defining foundational (myth).
It’s a fun way to say how many parameters are in the model without revealing a number like 405B or 17B which isn’t really comparable vs other models.
This reads like an AI with an overflowing context window wrote it; or in the alternative it’s a list of statutes written by an arrogant and delusional king. It is this type of arrogance that will lead to an unfavorable reaction by Congress.
> 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?
I think people are typically referring to the task-completion time horizon at a fixed success rate [1]. That has had pretty robust exponential scaling for many years now.
This was slightly more thoughtful than I feared it would be. However, what I still do not see in any posts from any of these AI pushers is any genuine consideration of the possibility that the best thing might be for them to do less of what they are currently doing. Not to do it differently. Not to mitigate it. Not to do something else in addition. But to actually reduce their current activities.
Release date seems like a terrible x axis with how much more compute they are using. Not to mention while
I like what METR is trying to measure, it is an uber specific metric. And frankly, me just complaining, they’re prompts I feel do most of the work for the AI. I’ve never gotten as detailed instructions as they give the AI for the task
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.
> "Models above a threshold of compute should undergo mandatory testing by a qualified third party for their level of risk in four specific areas: cybersecurity, biological weapons, loss of control of AI systems, and automated R&D that could accelerate these other risks."
AKA: Make it as expensive and untenable as possible for any open source model to jump through the regulation red tape so we can pull the ladder up behind us.
Disgusting.
All the marketing talk about "this model is so dangerous" "omg we can't release this to the public its so dangerous" etc. is just priming for the incoming lobbying for protectionism from foreign competition, and regulation preventing the development of any other model that could threaten their dominance in the name of "safety"
If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481131, users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things. Perhaps it was because they thought the comment broke the site guidelines by being snarky and/or fulminatey?
I don't think it was an extreme case of that, so I've turned off the flags now.
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.
I mean he wants to be trusted but he also absolutely doesn't support freedom of speech in that sense, and I doubt anyone with power or influence over ai policy does?
If you find a good lobbying group with money who can push for it let HN know.
To be honest, at this point I’d take any group at all willing to usefully and non-hypocritically push for free speech (as a general societal value, not just a US-specific legal notion).
"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.
LOTR is easy to love. It's a classic story arc, well told, and well adapted for mass consumption.
It's also a very thinly veiled metaphor for the ceaseless pursuit of industrialization in every aspect of life chipping away at the humanity and metaphorical magic of the human experience, and the perils of embarking on that endeavour to the exclusion of everything else.
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 :(
Look - it's WAY more fun to just call Dario a goober than engage with the actual substance of the essay. Duh!
Sure, this may be the most important invention ever with near certainty to reshape society over the next few years, but meh. We should probably just immediately dismiss the concerns of anyone working on it without addressing their arguments at all. It's easy, we can justify ignoring their warnings by saying they're self-interested or too self-important or whatever.
Life is more fun when you live it with your eyes closed! You should try it out too.
What about punishment on AI exponential for security failures, electric chairs for CEO of high ranked frontier models that gets jailbroken by geopolitical adversaries.
- 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.
Its like saying it’s normal for a taxi driver to drive people places while he’s got you handcuffed in the trunk.
"Yeah, and quotas on web scrapers!"
It would not be prohibitively hard to do the math on this.
That would fix a lot of the problems with AI overnight, but it'll also never happen.
- Your AI data centres will run only on renewable energy
- Your AI data centres will not use evaporative cooling
So, basically, make open-weight models illegal. It's nice for Dario to come out and say this so explicitly.
I'm personally very tired of reading the linear-algebra-median of every AI safety essay from lesswrong with the inserted opinion of "therefore all my competitors, especially those pesky open source ones from scary countries should be illegal, only I can be trusted to not abuse the computer god that I definitely will have in just a couple more releases and with a couple more trillion invested"
It turns out it means 'opener than Anthropic.'
> AI has become a major commercial technology
>Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety
> AI companies that develop advanced AI models must have strong security standards that protect their model weights
Anyway Dario's financial interests aside. This is an interesting breakpoint for me.
> Second, any response to AI-driven job displacement needs to address both the need to provide for everyone economically, and the need for people to find meaning, purpose, and agency. The latter is ultimately more important
To me this reads as an out of touch statement. I think the majority of people on earth work to keep a roof over their heads. Of course work can be a source of meaning, purpose, and agency, but to call it the more important aspect on a societal level is a sort of rich person like Dario statement to make.
For another, such regulations could prevent a competitor from making the weights open for their model to try and disrupt the competition.
And finally, Amodei would no doubt want to be involved in designing the tests the AI needs to pass, and could (and likely would) design it in a way that Anthropic models would be able to pass easier than competing models.
Then there's running inference service of open weights, which doesn't necessarily require opening a lab. You can grab Chinese model weights and sell inference.
Anthropic wants to make sure nobody can open a new domestic lab, or provide inference services of unauthorized open weight models, or release open weights if model is good. It is regulatory capture - it covers all areas that are dangers to Anthropic's bottom line.
Dario is also huge on regulations banning Chip exports to China, who are the only other real competitors to US Labs, open weight or not.
Also invariably, such corporations always create regulations that are easier for them and harder for competitors.
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.
This isn't guaranteed in the tax system as it exists today, because reinvestments into further growth are often treated as expenses which cancel out the income for tax purposes.
Without direct workforce or policymaker representation on the boards of private entities, the private sector will seek to maximize shareholder value even if that means workforce reductions.
It's not clear that any country could realistically ensure that incredibly powerful industries/private sector entities operate perfectly aligned with national interests, short of nationalization.
Large tech companies are already quasi-state actors. In theory, international law and regulations can be binding and enforceable. We see how well that works in practice.
How about 2 years ago? Back then, I wouldn't even trust it to write a 5-line function without making some sort of silly mistake.
Today, I can leave an agent running by itself for 20 or 30 minutes and most of the time, it comes back with a result that's either flawless or can be refined to be good with a few back and forth messages. Maybe I still have to make some high-level decisions ahead of time, but all of the details, including exploring the codebase and figuring out what to do based on that, can be left to the agent. The amount of improvement just in the last 2 years has been staggering.
Now extrapolate how things will look if the trend continues for another 2 or 3 years.
Is this guaranteed to happen? No. But people have been predicting that we're going to hit a wall for a long time now, and we haven't yet. Maybe there's a wall just ahead of us. But maybe there's not -- and the "not" case seems likely enough that we should at least be planning for it.
Do you mean policy-wise (like Dario is talking about), or more broadly?
I wonder about broad preparedness, but unfortunately there's not a lot that we "normal" people can do to prepare. Hoard savings and food? Learn physical trades?
A highly enthusiastic concussion enthusiast with 10 hands is how one person put it.
These are people in different fields but highly accomplished so I’m feeling comfortable sharing their assessment.
I'd rather be thinking about these issues in advance rather than waiting until the problem becomes real.
Fable is essentially bricked for my areas of interest (even being a member of the cybersecurity program). It seems like they’re attempting to sell regulatory capture under the guise of safety. That’s more of the point.
That said Claude Code has a million features like loops that I know exist but never use.
I imagine that spending a lot more time creating an initial spec goes a long way towards independence, I just don't usually do that.
It's a clever argument because if you question it, you're reminded of the entire history of technological development which is, guess what, exponential.
You're sometimes also dismissed as not understanding the concept of exponentials. This again is clever, as it's baked into the definition that if you don't see it happening, or can't imagine it happening, well that's precisely a tell you're living through an exponential!
All the reasons you might give can be countered with, essentially, "that problem that seems clear today will go away sooner than you can imagine and when it does you'll be on the back foot, so you'd better just assume it will go away and project/plan accordingly".
The trick is entirely that one cannot possibly deny the general power of exponential progress across all of technology, it's almost a law, but it doesn't work in the other direction - no particular local technology is owed exponential growth because of this general pattern. Sometimes things just cap out at merely 'useful' and don't improve much further, no matter how much you want to believe they won't, no matter how steep the progress curve (or, indeed, line) has been up to that point.
To this point the narrative of what these tools can do over these last 3 or 4 years has always been way ahead of the reality. Everyone who works with the tools knows this.
Not everyone wants it to be true, so some will not acknowledge it and will just keep pushing this year-ahead projection as ground truth today. Many (not all) of those people aren't builders, so they don't have to deal with present reality jarring up against this projection of what ought to be possible, they're safe just talking about what should hypothetically be possible and making plans around that that won't be executed for months to years anyway. This keeps the flywheel going, and in fairness, some of the reality has actually caught up in certain ways, so some of those plans will have to some degree worked out which spins the flywheel faster still.
In the end though I just keep thinking: it's been 4 years (as referenced in the post). A lot has happened, the tools are very cool and very useful for certain things. But when I put my head up and look around in the world, even just the software world, nothing's really changed in terms of actual outcomes, in terms of new things appearing or being built that didn't exist 4 years ago. Certainly nothing feels instinctively like it's improved much, subjectively.
Maybe this is what it feels like to be in the knee of a curve of an exponential, but it seems equally reasonable this is just a breakthrough that's kind of improving at a clip you'd expect it to for all the investment put in, but fundamentally is just a new tool that needs to be slowly commercialised in an economically rational way, as we gear up for the next breakthrough which may or may not be related. Who says it must just keep improving forever? This argument never made much sense to me.
- All of your observations are absolutely dead on
- Yet, we have very very very robust scaling laws that as Dario points out we've had and validated for over a decade. This extends to downstream measures like METR time horizon and compsosite benchmarks like the epoch capability index.
- If you look at where you're at now, which is again dead on, you're looking at a point on a curve that is quite easy to extrapolate, but less easy to tell when exactly on the curve a certain capability or use case undergoes a step change from error rates dropping below a threshold that is hard to anticipate in advance.
So while Dario / other frontier CEOs are understandably unpalatable, they are absolutely spot on with a call out that all of this is bound to happen and happen quickly, and that's without solving several core problems that haven't been solved yet (e.g. continual learning). In 2023, coding agents were just laughable. Yet they followed the same predictable training curves. Anyone looking at the data can see the obvious, and anyone reading newspaper headlines or hacker news comments would get a very different impression.
By my read of the (very sparse) data, we're getting linear improvements in capability for super-linear increases in costs. [1] Indicates that by 2027 models will cost $1 billon to train. Dario estimates that model runs will cost $10 billion in 2026 [2]. That to me indicates costs are potentially growing faster than capability. Maybe by quite a bit.
If the value prop of LLMs doesn't prove out, that won't last. I'm of the opinion there is no data that shows actual economic value being delivered by models. The best data shows that LLM use might be destroying value [3].
[1] https://epoch.ai/publications/how-much-does-it-cost-to-train... [2] https://lexfridman.com/dario-amodei-transcript/ [3] https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
This is true and well established.
As long as you get any improvement whatsoever, it is worth spending to train since it pays off during.
Imagine training was not $1 billion but $100 billion but the performance improved by just 10%. This is still worth it because you can squeeze out the profits across years and years right? The improvement is ever lasting.
> The best data shows that LLM use might be destroying value [3].
This is basically a conspiracy theory and if you really believed this, you should not have led with "How is the capability advancement vs dollars paid for development?" because if there were no value, it doesn't really matter how much you invest.
Tech people are following a religious belief system whose utopian promise is the all-powerful computer that will end all suffering. I once read an article in reason magazine from over 30 years ago about how an advanced computer in the future will bring everyone who has ever lived back from the deat and let them live in paradise. They were completely serious. Atheists reading this may object to my description of the tech belief system as religious, but I believe it is accuarte. The idea that tech is an imrpovement and will improve people's lives is believed as an act of faith. Tech has its own moral systems based on some form of libertarian progressivism. And in the future, through the inevitable scientific magic of exponential something, a computer will ascend to godhood and judge all mankind for their actions before allowing some into eternal paradise.
To what extent any of this is true is up for debate, but most west coast tech elite are actively working towards this future, and these are the ideas that drive them. It's hard to talk to them about it because this is their woldview, and they imagine everyone to believe what they do.
Uh, I don't really think that's anywhere close to an accurate characterization of most people here. Everyone, including Dario and any researcher at any frontier lab, knows the situation is quite scary and unprecedented. There are problems that will be solved and diseases that will be cured, but will we be living in an Orwellian universe? Will a rogue drone swarm find you cowing in your basement and murder you? I mean the technology for this is already mostly here, it's a matter of the willpower and budget to roll out something really evil.
The comment's question is about capabilities and why the discussion about capabilities often times is far removed from todays capabilities.
Okay, I don't understand how legitimate access is granted then. Surely, Dario isn't saying to ban Sonnet, because I can definitely make it do cyber harm, as most exploits that I've seen in the wild with my own eyes were trivial.
So the only way I see his proposal working is:
- No open weights, AI is centralized in the hands of few
- We get AI-FAA that sets the rules and monitors
- If I want to do a security scan of my codebase, I get a time and scope limited license from AI-FAA that I upload to claude that will allow it to run the security scan in cloud with their models - Claude Mythos Scanner(TM).
Dario's proposal ultimately requires that people lose direct access to inference via API. Is this why they've been building SaaS clones with AI bolted on?
- And this were the first steps of Anthropic establishing worldwide corporate technocracy.
- And this is when Anthropic lost and everyone got access to AI.
Similar to how IBM's defeat allowed us to have PCs.
If that arrogance was well placed at least you could somewhat excuse it, but the fact that it is so overtly hypocritical and based on false premises just makes it so much worse.
They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money?
Protect your own monopoly, protect your customers' regulations. They want strong regulation like the FAA to raise barriers to entry for the foundation models they themselves build, but then why do they want to loosen FDA regulations? While at the same time driving token consumption from their own customers.
They talk about permanent job displacement and UBI. I usually call this "a morally packaged safe landing."
They are doing something unpopular (destroying jobs) and getting criticized for it. But they do not want to be criticized further, and they want to ask for social sympathy. So they claim a 'noble cause' that everyone can sympathize with and that is safe for themselves
AI will generate astronomical productivity gains and capital profits, which AI companies privatize. So why should the social costs be paid by national taxes? In my opinion, something like "We will donate all of our AI companies' revenue for the next 10 years to society" would show genuine sincerity.
Then they say, if we do not develop AI, China will eat our lunch, and they go after China. But is not this really about preventing Chinese dumping, maintaining our own token prices, and asking the world to beat down China so that they can preserve global tech hegemony?
But by blocking China from the CUDA ecosystem, now the CANN ecosystem has emerged, has it not? If China develops techniques that reliably reduce inference costs, who knows how things will turn out then.
Honestly, I like Anthrpic's Claude, but the Anthropic CEO's rhetoric is so stale. It is not that it feels hypocritical. It is that this is just a one dimensional rhetorical tactic that assumes the public is stupid.
I do not think open source is unconditionally good. (It is good, but it can become bad in all situations or all countrie). Open source itself is a barrier for countries outside the Anglosphere when they want to release IT products. Because there is no incentive to buy a product that is worse than an open source alternative. So I do not think everything necessarily has to be open source.
But this (referring to Anthropic's position) seems to treat people like fools. If regulation is needed, shouldn't they also argue that FDA regulation is needed? I wish they would be consistent
Training frontier AI models costs money, orders of magnitude more than third-party audits. If you can afford to build the model, you can afford to have it audited.
This is a somewhat ironic take from someone who very publicly feuded with the US government about whether their AI could be used for waging war.
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.
That this is worded so definitively is a testament to the success of the AI industry. The idea that LLMs will be "better at evrything than humans"[sic] is far from certain.
I suspect that if someone does invent a machine like this, it won't look like a 2026 LLM, and it will be far far in the future. everybody relax.
Really the entire future of AI at this point seems like "Don't worry about it, we'll figure out when we get there". Works a lot better if you're extremely rich and can afford your own private security.
Prompt: The robber is stealing the crown jewels.
Output: You must stop the robber from stealing the crown jewels.
But yeah if society collapses these billionaire nerds are the first to go. Quietly, in their bunkers, while the team leader of their seal mercenary team takes over.
Even before the rest of us realizes what's happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
> Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
How much of the policy prescription changes if the exponential is actually just a series of sigmoids[1]?
[1]: https://x.com/ylecun/status/1799064075487572133
-C.S. Lewis
I understand why Dario thinks this is crucial, but it's a very dystopian view of the medium-term future.
I'm not an optimist to the point that I believe that AI will lead to global Star Trek-style utopia (although it theoretically could), but ongoing disparity between "allied" and "enemy" powers relating to hardware technology and software models is both not really possible to enforce in the long term, and a pretty dismal state of global affairs even if successful.
I'd be interested in an expert geopolitical opinion on what the long tail of this would really look like in any sort of reasonable reality.
What makes me doubt that Dario Amodei has really internalized the problem is the lack of humility, the stance that it's just important that the "good guys" keep the technology away from the "bad guys".
If you really want to provide AI with public benefit, you need to prevent power concentration. How? Some unpolished ideas, I'd be happy to hear yours:
- Avoid getting too close to an administration that is openly attacking democracy and is not interested in the benefit of humanity or mutually beneficial cooperation.
- Don't support surveillance. Non-(US-)Americans have human rights and privacy, too. Prepare for a situation where a government tries to convert your compute infrastructure into surveillance infrastructure.
- Support the creation of community data centers. In other words, build data centers together with local communities and make sure they profit from them.
- Advocate for laws that require transparency about resource usage and emissions of data centers.
- If you don't want an AI race, make sure that other countries don't need to fear the US concentrating too much power. Create institutions that can be trusted by other countries, too.
EDIT: I forgot:
- If qualified labor will actually turn out to get devalued, we also need a plan to prevent states from turning into rentier states that don't depend on a well-educated society any longer.
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.
In the 60 years since, we've barely been able to adapt the 737 to fly longer routes.
The fact that he doesn't support more restrictive approaches that don't align with his incentives doesn't invalidate the points he is making.
Personally I feel most of the improvement in the last year comes from tooling/integration (MCPs, realtime documentation access, treesitter support, orchestration) than from the models themselves, in the last year. And still frontier models would routinely come up with bs until you tell them to actually use those tools.
Two years ago, I couldn't trust an LLM to do anything that wasn't straight forward boiler plate.
One year ago, I was pretty solid at writing algorithms that were combinations of existing ideas.
Now, Fable is outputting stuff that I would genuinely consider to be creative and original if a colleague had presented it to me.
Yes, maybe the code style still isn't great, but given the pattern of the last few years, it feels correct (a priori) to assume that this gap isn't going to keep closing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
I am going to say it. The CEO of a pre-IPO company has extreme incentive to bolster the tech he is selling, to the point where his every action should be viewed as only in service to that goal. Every word he says should be viewed critically through that lense. He is not making this post out of the goodness of his heart, he is doing it in service to the IPO. If it happens to align with your views that's great, but it's still just a marketing stunt to get people with your views to buy in. Don't be fooled. Buy in if you feel it's a good deal, not because of the CEO's marketing.
Also, on an unrelated note, why would you have an account for 5 years and only now post your second comment? AI has been an existential threat for years, why only now?
This is a pattern I am seeing all over the place on HN in the last year in AI threads, and I have to admit that I am starting to become paranoid and my feels need some assuaging.
However, my point isn't that I think Dario is our saviour who we should follow the every word of. As with everyone, his opinions should be filtered through the lens of his incentives. That said, I don't understand the knee-jerk reaction by many commenters to completely disregard the many important points he's making.
As for the lack of my account use, I can't comment for others, but I'm just quite shy. I've opened up the comment box many times to write a reply but rarely commit to actually posting it, especially because I feel like I'm not on the side of the general HN consensus.
The quality of discussion and prose on HN is just generally so high that it can feel quite a bit intimidating to jump in (in contrast to Reddit where I have no worries about commenting haha).
This is a massive exaggeration. The advancement in the automation of computer code writing has been impressive and is obviously, at least in the short term, changing the software engineering industry substantially. Most other fields have not been affected to nearly the same degree. Certainly not biology, physics, finance, and law (I don't know enough about the math and translation fields to speak to those).
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"3. Accelerating AI’s positive impact..."
This whole section is the type of thing that often comes out of the mouths of Silicon Valley tech executives without a pharma background. It indicates a thorough lack of understanding of the realities of pharmaceutical research. What he is describing here is removing many of the solid, evidentiary rules that are in place to make sure that the drugs reaching the market actually work and replacing them with proxy predictions. Look, my least favourite part of the job is the animal testing, and I would be hugely grateful if that could be eliminated from the drug discovery pipeline. People have been trying to do that for a long time. But it's extremely difficult. Biology is very, very complicated. Our understanding of how processes in organisms work are vague and approximative. This is not computer code. Even if Anthropic somehow got all of Big Pharma to hand them their proprietary data, it would only scratch the surface of the understanding that is needed to solve these kind of problems. Due to these realities, the program Amodei is describing here would, effectively, open a floodgate of drugs on the market that don't actually do what they are supposed to and are more likely to have unidentified toxicity.
Each of the nouns is a “size class” in literature. From small lines poem (haiku, sonnet) to larger story (fable) to very large story (opus) to culture-defining foundational (myth).
It’s a fun way to say how many parameters are in the model without revealing a number like 405B or 17B which isn’t really comparable vs other models.
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?
[1] https://metr.org/time-horizons/
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”.
[1] https://metr.org/time-horizons/
> "Models above a threshold of compute should undergo mandatory testing by a qualified third party for their level of risk in four specific areas: cybersecurity, biological weapons, loss of control of AI systems, and automated R&D that could accelerate these other risks."
AKA: Make it as expensive and untenable as possible for any open source model to jump through the regulation red tape so we can pull the ladder up behind us.
Disgusting.
All the marketing talk about "this model is so dangerous" "omg we can't release this to the public its so dangerous" etc. is just priming for the incoming lobbying for protectionism from foreign competition, and regulation preventing the development of any other model that could threaten their dominance in the name of "safety"
Also, why has my comment been flagged? It is sitting at positive votes but has suddenly been flagged for no apparent reason?
I don't think it was an extreme case of that, so I've turned off the flags now.
It feels somewhat obvious that someone just disagreed and flagged it.
Is there a system for holding people accountable who abuse flags?
I've restored a few other comments that were similarly flagged as well.
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.
If you find a good lobbying group with money who can push for it let HN know.
I'm sure you have evidence for this
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.
It's also a very thinly veiled metaphor for the ceaseless pursuit of industrialization in every aspect of life chipping away at the humanity and metaphorical magic of the human experience, and the perils of embarking on that endeavour to the exclusion of everything else.
Personally, I find some humour in this situation.
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 :(
Sure, this may be the most important invention ever with near certainty to reshape society over the next few years, but meh. We should probably just immediately dismiss the concerns of anyone working on it without addressing their arguments at all. It's easy, we can justify ignoring their warnings by saying they're self-interested or too self-important or whatever.
Life is more fun when you live it with your eyes closed! You should try it out too.