FWIW he gives his ethical reasoning on his website:

> Broadly, I am supportive of arming democracies with the tools needed to defeat autocracies in the age of AI—I simply don’t think there is any other way. But we cannot ignore the potential for abuse of these technologies by democratic governments themselves. Democracies normally have safeguards that prevent their military and intelligence apparatus from being turned inwards against their own population, but because AI tools require so few people to operate, there is potential for them to circumvent these safeguards and the norms that support them. It is also worth noting that some of these safeguards are already gradually eroding in some democracies. Thus, we should arm democracies with AI, but we should do so carefully and within limits: they are the immune system we need to fight autocracies, but like the immune system, there is some risk of them turning on us and becoming a threat themselves.

Basically, he's afraid that not arming the government with AI puts it at a disadvantage vs. other governments he trusts less. Plus, if Anthropic is in the loop that gives them the chance to steer the direction of things a bit (what they were kicked out for doing).

It's not the purest ethical argument, but I also would not say that there is a clearly correct answer.

If you look at his comments about Palantir and their proposed safeguards, it's clear it's a case of "if you are dining with the Devil, you'd better bring a very long spoon"

I've heard Palantir is essentially the only federal cloud vendor with this administration for secure services. By "partnered up with Palantir", do you mean they provided their models to the government? Or something more?

If you actually read the memo they've clearly put in strict terms with Palantir and rejected many of the false "safeguards" offered by the company

Same. What sam tried to do on his own, he failed at (not horribly failed, but he certainly wasn't in the same league as zuckerberg or page or gates or musk - he raised at least $30M then was forced to sell a failure of a product for $40M).

His ascendancy only came when he basically was given an ulta powerful position by an ultra powerful man.

> The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire

Someone told me in another comment that it's possibly bot activity. I suspect so too, because in a tech forum like HN, a top voted comment can shift the entire focus/narrative of any given issue. I know there are a lot of mods on here to prevent this sort of thing, but given how good LLMs have gotten, I wonder if we are at a point where humans can even discern cases where this a mix of human and AI involvement in online activity (such as commenting).

Why is that weird? If we do that for UFC and other sports

It's very easy to adopt a posture of above-it-all cynicism, and to think that anyone who sees an important distinction between two flawed powerful people is a sucker. But it's not particularly smart or sophisticated, and it's not helpful. In politics, the assumption that they're all equally corrupt and sociopathic is exactly what the worst of them want us to default to. In rich-guy PR wars, too, it's only going to work to the benefit of the ones with 0 principles, at the expense of the ones with some principles.

(Or, if the maximally cynical perspective is correct and 'principles' always actually means 'a company culture and public image that depends on the appearance of having principles, and which requires costly signals of principledness to maintain' -- well, why on earth shouldn't we favour the ones who have that property over the ones who are nakedly unprincipled, and the ones who have a paper-thin veneer that doesn't meaningfully affect their behaviour? It would be stupid to throw away the one bit of leverage we have to make powerful people behave better than they otherwise would.)

The only vibe I get from Altman is that he's a weasel, willing to say anything or burn whatever to get what he wants.

Given Gates' current reputation, I don't think this aged well.

> pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?

Paul Graham was a pudgy mediocrity clever enough to capitalize on nerds' obsession with Lisp, and leverage it into f-you money. Game recognized game in the shape of Sam Altman.

its reasonable praise. a 19 year old social outcast who grew up in the midwest drops out of ivy league and starts a company before smartphones exist that he sells for $43 million dollars at age 27, then invested almost all the money into more startups, became a billionaire, and hijacked chatgpt from the richest person in the world.

its not a comment on his ethics or morality

Hmm I know quite a few real people pushing QuitGPT and none of them work for Anthropic.

> and they should ignore the government which ostensibly represents the people

Barely represents the people. Especially not on the issue of domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous killing machines. Or the war in Vietnam.