Reading this makes me even happier to pay for Anthropic.
Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out.
" “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied. (Altman said that this was not quite his recollection, and that he had accused the Amodeis only of “political behavior.”) In 2020, Amodei, Daniela, and other colleagues left to found Anthropic, which is now one of OpenAI’s chief rivals."
If you think Amodei is significantly different you’re going to be disappointed. There is nothing he has done that can’t be adequately explained as furthering his own interests. Remember how Musk doesn’t like Altman too? It’s because they’re all the same people, competing for the same thing.
I can go with the thesis that individuals need community control (boards, regulations, laws) in order to be accountable but is there some specific evidence that Amodei is the same? It seems like a "both sides" argument.
Community control typically doesn't work to constrain great men, a group has more weak points than an individual (look for example how easily Sam dismantled the OpenAI board decision by applying the right pressure).
The greatest and often only check on power has always been competition or opposition by other great men.
Not great men. People with "perceived" high networth. Banks will fall over backwards to loan them money. See Chase and Musk. Let's not associate perceived networth with "great"
I don’t need to convince you, we’ve been through enough cults of personality, time will tell. But I’ve been right enough times to back myself. Maybe it’s because I grew up around a lot of people like them? They can’t hide that they would say whatever they think you want to hear.
Actually it’s funny: Their lack of empathy/emotional intelligence would also make them susceptible to thinking that talking to an LLM is like talking to a person, so maybe they really did think AGI was around the corner!
This comment rings a bell quite a bit.
It’s easy enough to see these kinds of people.
I just was fired earlier this year for made up performance reasons after multiple years at Apple due to a guy like this.
These soulless people exist out there and they don’t care that your dog just passed away or your close family member gets cancer.
They just move forward with their agenda and are experts at telling you what they think you want to hear. 200%
I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company, founded another one, that one’s models refused to do things that the previous company would do, then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it.
> I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company
Problematic why though? For the reasons publicly stated? Then why isn’t Anthropic just what OpenAI was “supposed” to be then? We know what that was from their charter, and Anthropic is not that.
> then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it
You’re sure about that are you? I don’t see how you possibly could be, unless you’ve taken the PR at face value, before it was all quietly swept away under the next headline.
What part is incorrect? Amodei never said that AI models should not be used for military purposes, did he? He said that they shouldn't be used for autonomous weapons, and then he backed up the talk with action.
I have other beefs with Amodei, including his pathetic, mewling appeals for regulatory capture and his forehead-slapping hypocrisy on copyright and ToS enforcement, but this seemed like a case where he was legitimately on the right side of the question and had the moral courage to stand by his position.
There’s been enough divergence between words and actions from Amodei for me to also consider him deceitful, if that’s really the low bar you want to set. I’m not saying he’s worse than Altman, just to be clear.
You are a beacon of hope man. Please, please, continue the good fight, we need you.
We keep seeing the establishment resurfacing and imposing this blanket surveillance globally. What's happening in Brazil, the UK, EU, and has already happened in the US with no legislation or via the 5-eyes is scary.
Who are these people pressuring elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats to legislate against their constituents? Who are these lobbyists?
I get that there is a large constituency that wants to control dissidents and the narrative in the name of child abuse - see what's happening in the UK where people get arrested in the thousands for posting comments online.
Abolishing privacy is not the way to protect children. Police work and prosecution is. For reference see the grooming gangs in the UK, the infamous Eps*% case for which everyone is still walking free, and other cases in various EU countries. This is not whataboutism, it's proof that we have not taken the required steps as a western society to combat this. You don't press the nuclear option as your first action.
If it's bot farm meddling that is the true target, then ban bots and get technology to work properly. Creating ID honeypots on poorly protected website operator servers is not the solution.
Call your politicians, call your EU MEPs, call everyone you can. This matters because it's about our future.
This would not work. Investors are still based in actual countries. Jurisdictions will also always have the ability to tax a % of revenue at source / where it was generated and not on profit rolled up through spvs to a couple low tax havens ;)
I've heard of Chris but not too well. This guy does not f*c$ around, don't get on his bad side.
The state of research is dire at the moment. The whole ecosystem is cooked. Reproducibility is non-existent. This obvious cartel is a symptom and there should be exemplary punishment.
Publishers are commercially incentivized to simply maximize profit and engagement. The main actors are academics and most of them try to uphold the high standards and ethics. Yes there is free-riding, backstabbing and a lot of politics but there is also reputation and honesty.
A few academics give academia a bad name, at the worst possible time and when society needs honest, reliable, reproducible and targetted research the most.
Huh? The linked article is nothing more than "this guy is black, so therefore helping any underprivileged black people gain university admissions is bad"
It's outrageous racism. A conclusion about all minorities based on one person's math mistake, where the logic is entirely based on shared skin color.
If you replace the races and make it a conclusion about legacy admissions or something, it's obviously stupid and illogical, right?
"This white guy doesn't know Afghanistan from Kazakhstan. More proof legacy admissions is bad!"
There's a bunch of needlessly inflammatory bullshit in that article. "Innumerate woke Bolshevik" and making fun of someone because he thinks she looks like a Harry Potter character. This guy seems like nothing more than a high school bully. E-mailing someone asking them to respond is nothing more than a fig leaf.
> Anyone who signed that petition is not only my personal enemy, but the enemy of free speech, the enemy of the spirit of the academy, and the enemy of western civilization.
All of academic publishing has fallen victim to Goodhart's law.
Our metrics for judging the quality of academic information are also the metrics for deciding the success of an academic's career. They are destined to be gamed.
We either need to turn peer review into an adversarial system where the reviewer has explicit incentives to find flaws and can advance their career by doing it well, or else we need totally different metrics for judging publications (which will probably need to evolve continuously).
I have no doubt that there are honest academics who publish research which actually contributes to humanity's corpus of knowledge. Whether that is some new insight into the past, observations on nature and man's interaction with it, clever chemical advances, or medical innovations which benefit mankind. People who publish works which will be looked upon as seminal and foundational in a decade or two, but also works which just focus on some particular detail and which will be of use to many researchers in the future.
But I can't shake the impression that a lot, perhaps the vast majority, of science consists of academics (postdocs and untenured researchers in particular I suppose) stuck in the publish-or-perish cycle. Pushing pointless papers where some trivial hypothesis is tested and which no one will ever use or read — except perhaps to cite for one reason or another, but rarely because it makes academic sense. Now with added slop, because why wouldn't you if the work itself is already as good as pointless?
Most scientists want to do good science. They get intrinsic meaning and satisfaction in doing so. But with any large group of people there will be a few bad faith actors that will manipulate any exploit in the system for their own personal benefit. The problem here is that 'the system' of academic appointments, and even more importantly, funding sources, are built around this publishing metric. This forces even the good faith scientists to behave poorly because it was a requisite to even being able to exist as a working researcher.
0. I think your perspective is really detached from the actual scientific enterprise. I think this kind of take exists when there are cultural clashes combined with a strong focus in the media and online with the mistakes and issues in science, not its successes.
Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about life and the universe faster than ever.
Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all of the scientific advances recently. All of them have contributors in academia (and science performed outside of academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as for scientist training).
1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but for the most part, these things are the exception, not the rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest. Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.
2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe it's not good for people to be constantly working under pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to fund people who have produced something and told the world about it ("publish").
3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go read an account of science in the early 19th century. There are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma, and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the failures are selected against.
Fantastic effort post and the necessary dose of fresh air to balance out hedonic skepticism.
The collapse in faith of institutions in various ways, for different reasons has created a vibe that gives any criticism of any institution has a whiff of plausibility, and these days that's all you need for some people to treat it as settled fact. That is basically what I think the poisoned and anti intellectual attitude of hedonic skepticism is all about.
The pace of technological advance over the past 5-10 years is staggering in so many ways. If our era weren't known for collapse of democracies and conflict, it could have been heralded as a major historical moment of technological advance on a number of levels.
I am sorry, but what did you expect? Since before Snowden we knew this was coming and this dystopian future is here only because we didn't care enough to do something about it.
Now, where are all these 'I don't have anything to hide people?' I don't see them anywhere...
Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out.
" “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied. (Altman said that this was not quite his recollection, and that he had accused the Amodeis only of “political behavior.”) In 2020, Amodei, Daniela, and other colleagues left to found Anthropic, which is now one of OpenAI’s chief rivals."
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