> How do you parse the difference between marketing and having values?

You don't. Companies want people to think they have values. But companies are not people. Companies exist to earn money.

> That hasn't happen with Anthropic for me.

Yet.

I am a fairly cynical person. Anthropic could have made this statement at any time, but they chose to do it when OpenAI says they are going to start showing ads, so view it in that context. They are saying this to try to get people angry about ads to drop OpenAI and move to Anthropic. For them, not having ads supports their current objective.

When you accept the amount of investments that these companies have, you don't get to guide your company based on principles. Can you imagine someone in a boardroom saying, "Everyone, we can't do this. Sure it will make us a ton of money, but it's wrong!" Don't forget, OpenAI had a lot of public goodwill in the beginning as well. Whatever principles Dario Amodei has as an individual, I'm sure he can show us with his personal fortune.

Parsing it is all about intention. If someone drops coffee on your computer, should you be angry? It depends on if they did it on purpose, or it was an accident. When a company posts a statement that ads are incongruous to their mission, what is their intention behind the message?

Companies, not begin sentient, don't have values, only their leaders/employees do. The question then becomes "when are the humans free to implement their values in their work, and when aren't they". You need to inspecting ownership structure, size, corporate charter and so on, and realize that it varies with time and situation.

Anthropic being a PBC probably helps.

People have values, Corporations do not.

I believe in "too big to have values". No company that has grown beyond a certain size has ever had true values. Only shareholder wealth maximisation goals.

No company has values. Anthropic's resistance to the administration is only as strong as their incentive to resist, and that incentive is money. Their execs love the "Twitter vs Facebook" comparison that makes Sam Altman look so evil and gives them a relative halo effect. To an extent, Sam Altman revels in the evil persona that makes him appear like the Darth Vader of some amorphous emergent technology. Both are very profitable optics to their respective audiences.

If you lend any amount of real-world credence to the value of marketing, you're already giving the ad what it wants. This is (partially) why so many businesses pivoted to viral marketing and Twitter/X outreach that feels genuine, but requires only basic rhetorical comprehension to appease your audience. "Here at WhatsApp, we care deeply about human rights!" *audience loudly cheers*

> and even get into conflicts with governments over the issue.

To be fair, they also cooperate with the US government for immoral dragnet surveillance[0], and regularly assent to censorship (VPN bans, removed emojis, etc.) abroad. It's in both Apple and most governments' best interests to appear like mortal enemies, but cooperate for financial and domestic security purposes. Which for all intents and purposes, it seems they do. Two weeks after the San Bernardino kerfuffle, the iPhone in question was cracked and both parties got to walk away conveniently vindicated of suspicion. I don't think this is a moral failing of anyone, it's just the obvious incentives of Apple's relationship with their domestic fed. Nobody holds Apple's morality accountable, and I bet they're quite grateful for that.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

The steelman argument is that super-intelligent AGI could allow any random person to build destructive technology, so companies on the path toward creating that ought to be very careful about alignment, safety and, indeed, access to weights.

The obvious assumed premise of this argument is that Anthropic are actually on the path toward creating super-intelligent AGI. Many people, including myself, are skeptical of this. (In fact I would go farther - in my opinion, cosplaying as though their AI is so intelligent that it's dangerous has become a marketing campaign for Anthropic, and their rhetoric around this topic should usually be taken with a grain of salt.)

I would not consider myself an expert on LLMs, at least not compared to the people who actually create them at companies like Anthropic, but I can have a go at a steelman:

LLMs allow hostile actors to do wide-scale damage to society by significantly decreasing the marginal cost and increasing the ease of spreading misinformation, propaganda, and other fake content. While this was already possible before, it required creating large troll farms of real people, semi-specialized skills like photoshop, etc. I personally don't believe that AGI/ASI is possible through LLMs, but if you do that would magnify the potential damage tenfold.

Closed-weight LLMs can be controlled to prevent or at least reduce the harmful actions they are used for. Even if you don't trust Anthropic to do this alone, they are a large company beholden to the law and the government can audit their performance. A criminal or hostile nation state downloading an open weight LLM is not going to care about the law.

This would not be a particularly novel idea - a similar reality is already true of other products and services that can be used to do widespread harm. Google "Invention Secrecy Act".

"please do all the work to argue my position so I don't have to".

exactly. you cant compete morally when cheating, doing illegal things and supporting bad guys are norm. Hence, I hope open models will win in the long term.

Similar to Oracle vs Postgres, or some closed source obscure caching vs Redis. One day I hope we will have very good SOTA open models where closed models compete to catch up (not saying Oracle is playing a catch up with Pg).

Its not approved yet I think.

What year do you think it is? The US is actively aggressive in multiple areas of the world. As a non US citizen I don’t think helping that effort at the expense of the rest of the world is good.

The US military is famous for purely acting in self defence...

That's pretty bad.