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krrrh 4 days ago

The headline is:

“AI Safety Donors Paid Religious NGOs $3.3M for Statements on AI”

The headline above states:

“Anthropic & friends…”

It’s at best a misleading change, though the article merits discussion.

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nullbio 4 days ago | parent [-]

Did you read the article and the X thread? It is all tied to Anthropic. "Propaganda" is a more accurate description than "statements" when we're talking about paying bribes to religious NGO's for theological framing around AI and as a means for political connections and sway.

"The Future of Life Institute mobilized religious connections to support Anthropic and sway the Trump admin"

Series A Lead: Skype co-founder and Future of Life Institute co-founder/board member Jaan Tallinn personally led Anthropic's $124 million Series A funding round in May 2021 through his philanthropic/investment circles. [1] (https://siliconvalleyinvestclub.com/ar/investors/future-of-l...), [2] (https://dealroom.co/news/145208-anthropics-124m-series-a-cam...)

They're all in bed together.

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colejohnson66 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

HN guidelines say to use the actual title and to not editorialize it.

	▲	nullbio 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, my bad. I forgot there was a rule against changing the titles - it has been a while since I have read the guidelines. I'll make sure to remember that in the future. If a mod has issue with it could you please update it for me. It's past the edit window, so I can't change it myself.

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benlivengood 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hold on; GiveWell Labs/OpenPhil/Coefficient Giving is older (2011) than Anthropic, the AI safety folks are way older than OpenPhil (~90s, older sci-fi), and it stretches the imagination to claim that your product will kill everyone in order to sell more of it. That's conspiracy theory territory. Even cigarette companies pretended to be harmless.

I don't think it's a secret that the safety folks (including "doomers") are funding a lot of anti-AGI articles and researchers. But they're generally at odds with the big labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta) about the basic concept. The Yudkowsky branch believe AGI/ASI is incredibly likely to take over and end life on Earth. The major labs think the worst that can happen is a few more publicly embarrassing hacks but that anything truly dangerous is a distant threat. ~most safety researchers fall somewhere in the middle.

Anthropic started as a mid-safety reaction to the way OpenAI was being operated but is by no means close to the "doomer" end of the spectrum.