Ryan Greenblatt: belief

Transcript context

…em works best is if everybody has lawyers that are working in their client’s true best interest. There’s not some sense in which the lawyer is really truly motivated by the good of the justice system. But I think the way current AIs are shaping up, certainly how Anthropic’s AI is shaping up, is with this desire to maximize some notion of virtue or good or pro-social ends, and only to, as a distal tentative objective, help the user towards that end. So there’s this worry that AIs are not, in some deep sense, trying to make sure that I am okay and that my interests are protected in this future, especially given how centralized the development of frontier AI is ending up being. Do you have thoughts on that concern? There’s a lot here. First I would note that OpenAI’s current, at least public, strategy is more like that the AI should be aligned to the human operator or principal, and should just be pursuing their will, subject to various constraints or things it shouldn’t do. I would also say that I think you slightly overstated how much the Anthropic constitution talks about Claude treating being helpful to users as instrumental rather than terminal. One way the constitution could be written is, “Claude, you’re basically an employee of Anthropic who happens to be contracting for all these people. You should do what’s good and make some money for us.” Wait, no, that’s literally what the constitution says. Sorry, not literally what it says, but it’s like, “You should think of yourself as a contractor and as a firm…”…

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