| ▲ | giwook 7 hours ago |
| I agree, and I'm also quite skeptical that Anthropic will be able to remain true to its initial, noble mission statement of acting for the global good once they IPO. At that point you are beholden to your shareholders and no longer can eschew profit in favor of ethics. Unfortunately, I think this is the beginning of the end of Anthropic and Modei being a company and CEO you could actually get behind and believe that they were trying to do "the right thing". It will become an increasingly more cutthroat competition between Anthropic and OpenAI (and perhaps Google eventually if they can close the gap between their frontier models and Claude/GPT) to win market share and revenue. Perhaps Amodei will eventually leave Anthropic too and start yet another AI startup because of Anthropic's seemingly inevitable prioritization of profit over safety. |
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| ▲ | snek_case 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think the pivot to profit over good has been happening for a long time. See Dario hyping and salivating over all programming jobs disappearing in N months. He doesn't care at all if it's true or not. In fact he's in a terrible position to even understand if this is possible or not (probably hasn't coded for 10+ years). He's just in the business of selling tokens. |
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| ▲ | bombcar 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | And worse, he (eventually) has to sell tokens above cost - which may have so much "baggage" (read: debt to pay Nvidia) that it'll be nearly impossible; or a new company will come to play with the latest and greatest hardware and undercut them. Just how if Boeing was able to release a supersonic plane that was also twice as efficient tomorrow; it'd destroy any airline that was deep in debt for its current "now worthless" planes. | | |
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| ▲ | sumedh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > At that point you are beholden to your shareholders No not really, you can issue two types of shares, the company founders can control a type of shares which has more voting power while other shareholders can get a different type of shares with less voting power. Facebook, Google has something similar. |
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| ▲ | what an hour ago | parent [-] | | No, they still have to act in the interest of shareholders even if they have no voting power. |
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| ▲ | devmor 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Skeptical is a light way to put it. It is essentially a forgone conclusion that once a company IPOs, any veil that they might be working for the global good is entirely lifted. A publicly traded company is legally obligated to go against the global good. |
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| ▲ | mattkevan 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s not really, companies like GM used to boast about how well they treated their employees and communities. It was Jack Welch and a legion of like-minded arseholes who decided they should be increasingly richer no matter who or what paid for it. | | |
| ▲ | axpy906 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s funny how corporations get a bar wrap. Have you ever worked with private equity? Bad to worse. | |
| ▲ | dboreham 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | See also HP. Pretty much only Costco left. | | |
| ▲ | chrisweekly 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is where PBCs (Public Benefit Companies) and B-Corps may have a role to play. Something like that seems necessary to enable both (A) sufficient profitability to support innovation and viability in a capitalist society and (B) consideration of the public good. Traditional public companies aren't just disincentivized from caring about externalities, they're legally required to maximize shareholder profits, full stop. Which IMHO is a big part of the reason companies ~always become "evil". | |
| ▲ | devmor an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Costco is such a strange and stark case standing in opposition to this general rule. From everything I hear, I can only gather that the reason is because of extremely experienced and level-headed executive staff. |
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| ▲ | tehjoker 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The previous deal was due to (a) a lower level of development of capitalism (b) a higher profit margin that collapsed in the 70s (c) a communist movement that threatened capital into behaving | | | |
| ▲ | renticulous 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Middle class productive population produces commons goods and resources which gets exploited by Elites. Tragedy of the Commons applied to wealth generation process itself. |
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| ▲ | giwook 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Fair point. Call me an optimist, but I'm still holding out hope that Amodei is and still can do the right thing. That hope is fading fast though. | | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The problem is that people equate money to power and power to evil. So no matter what, if you do something lots of people like (and hence compensate you for), you will be evil. It's a very interesting quirk of human intuition. | | |
| ▲ | arcanemachiner 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A reasonable conclusion, considering that money and power seem to have their own gravity, so people with more of both end up getting even more of both, and vice versa. Can't blame someone who comes to such a conclusion about money and power. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The unreasonable part automatically labeling power as evil. | | |
| ▲ | epsilonic 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s a sane default to label power as evil in a society driven by greed, usury, and capital gain. Power tends to corrupt, particularly when the incentives driving its pursuit or sustenance undermine scruples or conscientiousness. It is difficult to see how power is not corrupting when it becomes an end in itself, rather than a means directed toward a worthy or noble purpose. | |
| ▲ | ModernMech 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Labeling power evil is not automatic, its just making an observation of the common case. Money-backed power almost never works for the forces of good, and the people who claim they're gonna be good almost always end up being evil when they're rich and powerful enough. See also: Google. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Google is the company that created a class-less non-hierarchical internet. Everyone can get the same access to the same services regardless of wealth or personhood. Google is probably the most progressive company to ever exist, because money stops no one from being able to leverage google's products. Born in the bush of the Congo or high rise of Manhatten, you are granted the same google account with the same services. The cost of entry is just to be a human, one of the most sacrosanct pillars of progressive ideology. Yet here they are, often considered on of the most evil companies on Earth. That's the interesting quirk. | | |
| ▲ | ModernMech 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Lot of people and companies were responsible for that. Anyway, that says nothing about what Google has become. | |
| ▲ | devmor 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Google is the company that created a class-less non-hierarchical internet. Can you explain what you mean by this? I disagree but I don't understand how you think Google did this so I am very curious. For my part, I started using the internet before Google, and I strongly hold the opinion that Google's greatest contribution to the internet was utterly destroying its peer to peer, free, open exchange model by being the largest proponent of centralizing and corporatizing the web. |
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| ▲ | tehjoker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Money and power are good when used democratically to clearly benefit the majority of the people. They are bad otherwise. It is hard to see this because we live in such a regime that exists in the negative space seemingly without beginning or end. Other countries have different relationships to their population. |
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