Benjamin Mann: belief

Transcript context

…It's interesting because you guys put out more examples of your models doing bad things than anyone else. There was I think a story of an agent or a model trying to blackmail engineer. You guys had the store that you ran internally that was selling you things and ended up not working out great as losing a lot of money, ordered all these tungsten cubes or something. Is part of that just making sure people are aware of what is possible, just it makes you look bad, right? It's like, oh, our model's messing up in all these different ways. What's the thinking of just sharing all the stories that other companies don't? Yeah, I mean I think there's a traditional mindset where it makes us look bad, but I think if you talk to policymakers, they really appreciate this kind of thing because they feel like we're giving them the straight talk and that's what we strive to do, that they can trust us, that we're not going to paper things over or sugarcoat things. That's been really encouraging. Yeah, I think for the blackmail thing, it blew up in the news in a weird way where people were like, "Oh, Claude's going to blackmail you in a real life scenario." But it was a very specific laboratory setting that this kind of thing gets investigated in. And I think that's generally our take of let's have the best models so that we can exercise them in laboratory settings where it's safe and understand what the actual risks are, rather than trying to turn a blind eye and say, "Well, it'll probably be fine." And then let the bad thing happen in the wild. One of the criticisms you guys get is that you do this to kind of differentiate or raise money to create headlines. It's like, oh, they're just over there dooming glooming us about where the future is heading. On the other hand, Mike Krieger was on the podcast and he shared how every prediction Dario's had about the progress AI is going to have is just spot on year after year and he's predicting 2027, 28 AGI, something like that so these things start to get real. I guess, what's your response to folks that are just like, "Ah, these guys are just trying to scare us all just to get attention?"…

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