The government is why they are dropping their pledge.

https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-hegseth-ai-pentagon-mil...

If you're a U.S. citizen, tax dollars from you and others will backstop any cancelled subscriptions, I guess good on you for not trying to pay them twice, though you get zero benefit with this approach.

Yes, this. It's unfortunate that anthropic dropped this and it's also exactly how the system is supposed to work. Companies don't regulate themselves, the government regulates the companies.

Now, you may notice that the government is also choosing not to regulate these companies...which is another matter altogether.

> I mean, yes, that is actually how world works.

And soon enough, it won’t work at all because of it.

> Those who wont will be taken over by those who do.

And if you compromise on your core values because of money, they weren’t core values to begin with¹. “I want to be ethical but if I am I won’t get to be a billionaire” isn’t an excuse. We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders at what we see as wrong because “everybody does it” or “that’s just business” or “that’s life”. Complacency and apologists are how a bad system remains bad.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

¹ I’m willing to give leeway to individuals. You can believe stealing is wrong but if you’re desperate and steal a loaf of bread to feed your kid, there’s nuance. A VC-backed company is something entirely different.

Was there actually a case of a model saying "America's founding father were black women", or is that just Elon fingering your amygdala with a ridiculous hypothetical that exists nowhere other than Elon's mind in order to justify Elon's personal bias tweaks when he doesn't like the wisdom-of-the-crowds answer his tools initially give?

The most important part of AI safety is AI alignment: making sure AI does what we want. It's very hard because even if AI isn't trying to deceive you it can have bad outcomes by executing your request to the letter. The classical example is tasking an AI to make paperclips, training the AI with a reward for making more paperclips. Then the AI makes the most paperclips possible by strip mining the Earth and killing anything in its way.

Sometimes you see this AI alignment problem in action. I once asked an older model to fix the tests and it eventually gave up and just deleted them

> Still waiting for an explicit answer on understand how 'safety' is truly distinguishable from 'censorship' or 'political correctness'

i've said this many times but the concept of ai "safety" is really brand safety. What Anthropic is saying is they're willing to risk some bad press to bypass the additional training and find tuning to ensure their models do not output something people may find outrageous.

david guetta, if that really is you, stick to music rather than using Nazi man's propaganda machine

Well we teach kids not to yell “Fire!” In a crowded theatre or “N***!“ at their neighbor. We also teach our industrial machines to distinguish between fingers and bolts, our cars to not say “make a left turn now” when on a bridge, etc

> I VERY LARGELY prefer an AI like grok that doesn't pretend and let the onus of interpretation to the user rather than a bunch of anonymous "researchers" that may be equally biased, at the extreme, may tell you that America's founding father were black women

Setting aside for a moment that Grok is manipulated and biased to a hilarious extent. ("Elon is world champion at everything, including drinking piss")

There is no such thing as "unbiased". There will always be bias in these systems, whether picked up from the training data, or the choices made by the AI's developers/researchers, even if the latter doesn't "intend" to add any bias.

Ignoring this problem doesn't magically create a bias-free AI that "speaks the truth about the founding fathers". The bias in the training data, the implicit unconcious bias in the design decisions, that didn't come out of thin air. It's just somebody else's bias.

All the existing texts on the founding fathers are filled with 250 years of bias, propaganda, and agenda pushing from all sorts of authors.

There is no way to have no bias, no propaganda, no "agenda pushing" in the AI. The only thing that can be done is to acknowledge this problem, and try to steer the system to a neutral position. That will be "agenda pushing" of one's own, but that's the reality of all history and all historians since Herodotus. You just have to be honest about it.

And you will observe that current AI companies are excessively lazy about this. They do not put in the work, but instead slap on a prompt begging the system to "pls be diverse" and try to call it a day. This does not work.

> Of course saying to someone to go kill himslef is a prety sure 'no-no' but so many things are up to interpretation.

Bear in mind that the context of Anthropic's pivot here are the Pentagon's dollars.

This isn't just about "anti-woke AI", it's about killbots.

Sure, Hegseth wants his robots to not do thoughtcrime about, say, trans people or the role of women in the military.

But above all he wants to do a lot of murder.

Antrophic dropping their position of "We shouldn't turn this technology we can barely control into murder machines" because they're running out of money is damnable.