Nathan Labenz: prediction

Transcript context

…at enhance our safety and security rather than degrade it, even if they look really effing stupid while doing it with the classifiers and, and so on, because that's what they feel it takes to do this. Uh, my guess is that the US government did not in any way feel it was necessary to put this level of control on biology and chemistry that they chose to do. I think that's them deciding this was necessary basically on their own. However, the US government clearly does care quite a bit about the controls on cyber. So I guess very high-level assessment first. What you said basically rings true to me. I think that's a good description as far as I understand of what it is they're trying to do. An additional wrinkle that I think you often hear from folks at Anthropic is, like, we need a leader that is going to be inclined to burn their lead at a critical time to use the advanced AIs that they and only they will have at that time to, like, solve all these safety and alignment problems in a super compressed, um, timeframe. And I've always been a little skeptical or allergic to that line of thinking because it certainly has a, you know, better us than them vibe to it, and I, I do worry that, that may be the, you know, the stuff with which the road to hell is paved. Are you, like, buying it at a high level? Like, are you sort of happy that they are racing ahead and leading and seemingly building some amount of lead over certainly everybody but maybe OpenAI, who, you know, is probably not too far behind on, on something similar? And do you think that, like, they will burn that lead when the time comes? Will they be allowed to burn the lead, and, and will it be productive? Like, macro strategy-wise, do you think this is a good strategy that you are happy they are playing? Well, it's interesting. They're kind of being forced to burn some portion of that lead because they were cut off from the model even internally for at least some period of time, really gonna push back their development. Whereas OpenAI was already not supposed to be using it by terms of service for anything of the kind, and so they have not been in any way delayed by this. And certainly it will, like, interfere with adaptation, it will interfere with revenue, it will interfere with people's willingness to trust these systems, and so this will hurt them. It will also hurt OpenAI and every other American AI company, but it will hurt Anthropic more. But yeah, I think that basically Anthropic for a while tried to define some very strict like, you know, RSPs and, you know, trig- you know, if/then trigger action plans, and basically have rule of law in terms of, like, how they would react to all of this, what would make them willing to burn some of their lead, what would make them willing to put things aside. And they've moved away from that to a large extent. They still have barriers where it's, "Okay, this is just ridiculous. Of course you have to stop for now." But much more towards a, "We will make good decisions in the moment about what safeguards we will require and what actions we will take." And I think we've seen so far them take pretty consistently strong safeguard actions, pretty consistently strong, uh, safety measures in response to what they've witnessed, unless they are flat-out lying about the current situation. But yeah, some aspects of the Fable launch, you know, do seem a little bit rushed, certainly in some ways, and we should certainly have questions about that. But mostly I think it comes down to if they fully believed that they were actually walking into big trouble, if they thought that this was actually going to get us all killed or cause some catastrophe or something, I think they would act accordingly. And the question is, do you trust them to continue to make good decisions on that level? You think they are making good decisions on that level, right? When I say continue to trust them, I'm saying that my opinion is their decisions have been reasonable so far, but I don't think that's obvious. But yeah, I do, I do think there's a good argument that, you know, there being somewhat of a gap between you and the first actor you do not trust certainly to act reasonably is a big factor. And I think the way the US government is reacting to the situation is very, very different than how they would react if there was a second Anthropic that was in China that also had a Mythos, right, that was being deployed at the same time. Then we would see a radically, radically different version of this response in ways that are very difficult to predict, but definitely would not look like this. So it is very, you know... Regardless of whether you like this situation, like, the argument that it matters seems pretty conclusive.…

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