Nathan Labenz: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr So that's the model. Now, the fight. I asked Tzvi to lay out what Anthropic's government strategy even is, the whole posture of pushing the frontier, preaching safety, and trying to wake the government up, and why he's so allergic to how cautious they've been about ever actually asking for anything. Let's change gears. There will be, of course, you know, more to explore with Fable or its, uh, probably slightly tweaked successor that we'll hopefully get access to again sooner rather than later, or at least I'm hoping that I get access back to it. I guess turning to the ensuing fiasco, I don't know if you would even agree with the characterization of Friday night's ban, export control, functional ban on Fable as a fiasco, but it's certainly a bit of a left-field curveball mess. I would maybe start with what do you think or how would you describe the strategy that Anthropic is playing? Like, they ke- they seem to obviously be killing it in the model game and then coming into repeated, uh, trouble in their interactions with the government. And I'm not sure really what to make of it. You know, what, what do you think they're trying to do with their interactions with the government in the first place? And then we can kind of get into how we got to where we are. I think that Anthropic... So their, their overall goal, right, or at least the goal as we understand it, is they are trying to be at the frontier of AI capability, and they are trying to pioneer ways to do this safely, right, for how they, what they feel is safe, while also, of course, making the money and creating the position to continue to be at the frontier and continue to make these improvements, and also people like money. And to eventually be able to build what they call powerful AI, which I generally call sufficiently advanced AI, is reasonably similar, such that we can then get all the nice things, but pre- create it in a way that we don't get all the terrible things, including potentially, you know, an existential risk or the, the end of human- the extinction of humanity. And also to help America and the world navigate this crucial time and ena- enact good policy and do the things that allow for the coordination necessary to ensure good outcomes and guard against bad outcomes. And, you know, they've been very consistently trying to wake the government up in various instances. They're trying to make them aware of how AI works, what the situation is, what AI can do, what it will be able to do, what risks this brings, and, uh, how to deal with those dangers. They've been relatively very conservative in what they call for the government to actually implement and do. They have-- they didn't get full-throated behind SB 1047, for example. They have not pushed for extremely aggressive regulations. They certainly have never pushed for anything remotely as aggressive as what just happened, even setting aside the fiasco level of implementation that was done, right? They are now calling for a, uh, licensing, de facto licensing regime. Now, the US government, in fact, has a de facto licensing regime. But what's going on right now, essentially, is they're just trying to deal with the implications of the model they've created and the fact that the US government is trying to deal with those implications while also not trusting or liking Anthropic very much, and also, like, pretty clearly not having any idea how any of this works, like, on a technical level, and not understanding what they're doing. So judging things based on vibes and political affiliation and associations and on who is willing to, like, respect their authoritah and bend the knee and, like, potentially give them various other things that they might want. And there's a huge communication and culture clash going on as part of this. But fundamentally speaking, what Anthropic is trying to do is give the public very powerful models and use those models in ways that 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.…

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