Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers.

It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

> Dario must think people are stupid.

All of those guys think people are stupid. That theme has been repeating over and over again.

Savings from back office automation go entirely into administrative bloat. I find it even less likely such efficiency would lead to breakthroughs than I do LLMs becoming super intelligent and doing it themselves, which I don’t find likely at all.

I mean they did solve the protein folding problem did they? NOt too far fetch to think it can automate cancer research or problem finding in some way.

It's an ideological thing. (We just had a conversation about ideology actually, remember?)

Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.

For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers meant no production happened.

Now, there's finally a chance at salvation. The capitalist Messiah is AGI and it will finally deliver them from those annoying laborers.

This ideological bent is why they're putting everything they have into AI. It's why VCs and their fellow capitalists are going so crazy.

They see it as a way to finally solve the contradictions of their ideology, but in reality it'd only create a new one: If everyone's out of a job, who will buy their products?

>People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own.

This is not true. There are two companies at the center of AI direction: Anthropic and OpenAI. If there were anyone on the plant who has the ability to influence our direction then it would be Dario Amodei.

Acknowledging the grievances is a good step, but it's not enough. There needs to be a clear explanation of actions to address them, a plan to enact those actions, and commitments with consequences in failure of those actions. Tell people how you're going to make them more employable and effective and needed. Tell people how your datacenters will be carbon neutral. Tell people how financial actions resulting in a frothy market will be coming to an end. He and Sam Altman alone have this power and their inaction says everything we need to know about their intent.

I don't think the problem is that people don't believe AI can be beneficial. The problem is the perception that AI will affect people's lives more negatively than positively, while a few get even more obscenely rich and powerful.

If you don't tackle the societal level problems, nobody will care about research breakthroughs.

Based on rhetoric from open ai and Anthropic, i don't think this is reasonable. If anything, their miracle of an AI should be able to solve the job market and economic bubbles. Deploy their agents on it, set up automated hedge funds, distribute the profits equitably to everyone on the planet and on and on.

But something tells me either they can't or they won't, so no trust will be built.

> Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem,

I just don't buy the AI labs approach to this stuff. Like, unless we can basically simulate the entirety of human biology, I don't really see how LLMs can make progress here. Maths is different as it doesn't require a real-world interface, and programming already (by definition) can be simulated on a computer.

Without that, I can't see much (if any) progress being made on domains like biology.

> People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own.

Anthropic is literally creating the bubble. It is not beyond their scope of influence, it is literally what they are consciously achieving.

As for peoples jobs, same actually applies. Anthropic is selling itself on dream of replacing jobs, even or especially where they are well aware AI does not perform that well. They are actively trying to replace people quickly before management notices it does not work well.

And also, they can influence how much their data centers contribute to global warming.

Not really. The problem is that the trust is violated here. What people fear is that government and large companies are going to use AI against them, and make the reverse impossible. Sadly, this is exactly what is happening.

And that's exactly what EU's AI regulation does. Of course, AI is being blamed for this happening, despite that last time I checked every EU parlementarian, every EU commission member is flesh and blood, the fact that it is 100% intentional government policy, humans, that are doing this to you using very un-AI methods.

You see, in this regulation, governments are allowed to use AI, and to approve uses of AI. So there is absolutely nothing in EU's AI directive at all that prevents government and large companies, with approval, from answering the phone, and all "support requests" with AI, and not with people. Also "if you agree" (just like you've agreed to selling your location data in your cell contract)

The watermarking algorithm itself has a VERY specific property that should have set off everyone's alarm bells: it is NOT the case that you can "check text for AI watermark". What it technically mandates is that if you provide access to a model, those people should be able to check if text is generated by that model. Not by any other model. It is NOT a general "is this AI?" check. So let's analyze how this works in 2 specific cases:

You get a mail from the government about taxes. You want to check if that text is generated by an AI and whether you even should ask to talk to a human. So you've got a piece of text, or an audio recording. Can you check if it's AI or not? NO YOU CAN'T. SynthID requires access to the model keys, and the legislation only mandates checks if you've got access to the model.

The government or some large company, however, puts in it's regulations that you're not allowed to use AI to communicate with them (we all know this is coming), and they get a piece of ChatGPT text (or from any public model) from you. They would like to enforce that they won't talk to AI can they do this? YES, since they have access to the model too, SynthID allows for this usecase AND the AI regulation makes this mandatory.

Is this in any way a problem with AI? No. Can anything be done about this by "fighting AI"? Well let's see ... will government institutions be forced to stop worsening services further if ChatGPT etc become inaccessible or obviously excluded by government and large company services? No.

What is being outlawed in the EU, in other words, is exactly ONE thing: that you use AI to help you in your dealings with governments and large companies. To assert your rights, to resolve issues faster, to make them wait rather than you, to ... THAT is being outlawed, nothing else. Only that YOU get help from AI.

This legislation will make it a big advantage to have access to "your own" model, because you'll have the SynthID keys, and the law behind you if you do that. And I don't mean local model, I mean your own model with your own SynthID keys, ie. not Google, not ChatGPT, not Claude, not Grok, and if the EU can make it happen, not Chinese models either. Finetuned models, however, will not have SynthID and so you'll never be able to prove text generated by them is AI, and you will not effectively have the power to refuse contracts or laws that specify they can use AI anyway.

It's the EU government making it clear they are using AI to avoid even having to talk to you at all while disallowing the use of AI by mere citizens to assert their rights, against them, or anything they have interests in, like phone or electricity companies.

See also this article by a genomics PhD about how intelligence is not the bottleneck in medical research.

https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the...

AI bros consistently handwave away any notions of the material world imposing limits, because (spoiler!) it's a religion where you start from the miracle and work backwards. "Oh, we'll just set up fully automated robotic research labs everywhere!" Where will you get the raw materials? Oh we'll mine the asteroids! How will you find the energy to get there? Oh, the AI will invent new physics! (again without needing to run experiments). Et.c.

Didn't and don't mean to disparage anyone's medical struggles, but "a cure for cancer" is a well-worn strawman. One that's been achieved for the low hanging fruit, the higher ones are seeing steady progress (already before LLM chatbots, even!), the bottleneck isn't "intelligence" and to the extent there are socioeconomic (access to screening, treatment) or environmental/lifestyle factors involved the AI boom is likely just making things worse!

I'm sure Dario knows this, and it's anyway too pedestrian compared to the usual list of fruits of ASI. The text probably originally read "nanobots eating you alive and uploading to the cloud" or something, but they figured that wouldn't go over with the intended audience. "What do the peasants care about? Oh I know! Curing cancer!"