No, that’s not accurate at all, and in case you are genuinely confused:
1. Anthropic should be free to sell its services under whatever legal terms and conditions it wants.
2. The Pentagon should be free to buy those services, negotiate for different terms, refuse to buy those services, and terminate contracts subject to any termination clauses.
You may or may not agree with what the Pentagon wants to do, but if things had stayed there, there would be no real issue.
The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).
Any “explanation” that doesn’t address that is confused itself or trying to confuse the issue.
I leave it to you as to which category the linked source falls under.
> The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).
My take is that the DoD very much wanted to continue using Claude. However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage. The DoD took this as a personal offense (how dare this guy, does he know who we are, etc) and lashed out in retaliation. The whole sequence of events makes sense when viewed under this lense.
> Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage.
So did Altman. The terms of each company’s agreement with the DoW are roughly the same when they come out of the wash.
“Mr. Altman negotiated with the Department of Defense in a different way from Anthropic, agreeing to the use of OpenAI’s technology for all lawful purposes. Along the way, he also negotiated the right to put safeguards into OpenAI’s technologies that would prevent its systems from being used in ways that it did not want them to be.”
It is more likely the plan purposely gave Anthropic terms it knew it would not accept to give a certain public perception. OpenAI was always going to be the recipient, but for reasons unknown, they could not make the deal directly, and had to create the perception that they had no choice.
> However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage.
And that's 100% acceptable and legal. They have the right to do that. And DoW can then turn around and say "no deal". And that's 100% acceptable and legal.
So Hegseth going above and beyond and lashing out on the People's behalf like a butthurt child is unwarranted at best, and should definitely be illegal if it's not already.
I agree, my point is simply that Hegseth lashing out over Amodei's refusal is more plausible than a grand conspiracy to move to OpenAI (while simultaneously locking themselves out from Claude).
Either human is a special category with special privileges or it isn’t. If it isn’t, the entire argument is pointless. If it is, expanding the definition expands those privileges, and some are zero sum. As a real, current example, FEMA uses disaster funds to cover pet expenses for affected families. Since those funds are finite, some privileges reserved for humans are lost. Maybe paying for home damages. Maybe flood insurance rates go up. Any number of things, because pets were considered important enough to warrant federal funds.
It’s possible it’s the right call, but it’s definitely a call.
If you're talking about humans being a special category in the legal sense, then that ship sailed away thousands of years ago when we started defining Legal Personhood, no?
Yes, humans tell themselves stories to justify their choices. Are you telling yourself the story that only bad humans do that, and choosing to feel that you are superior and they are worth less? It might be okay to abuse them, if you think about it…
For 99.9% of issues, we rely on trust to make up our minds. We assume people are mostly not lying. If a group of people are found to lie, then yes, maybe “look for the truth behind the actual claims” is worth it, but more likely shooting them out of the discourse and into the metaphorical sun is the right response. If you walk around lying, you don’t get to complain that people aren’t doing research on your claims.
Sure, but how does that relate to environmentalists? The people lying were the car industry, but somehow the OP questions environmentalism. Why are they not questioning the car industry?
This is something I see a lot in science skepticism.
Someone incorrectly conveys a simple science concept, and people blame the scientist, not the communicator.
Like, News says "New revolutionary battery" and people roll their eyes and say "Oh but this will never make it to prod" and decide that scientists are liars and conveniently ignore that lithium battery density has like doubled over the past 20 years or so.
The person who was wrong was the unaware journalist taking a PR person's claims at face value, and having no context to smell test such a claim, and having no time or interest to treat the claim with skepticism anyway because "Batteries slightly improve" never sold newspapers.
Why? There are massive incentives for people to lie in a great many cases, especially where profits exist. Car manufactures, as we know, gladly lie and fake evidence. Even when there are massive fines involved, the fines are generally less than what they make in profit from the lies.
What's even better is you can play both sides to confuse the issue. Create 3rd party groups on the other side of your claims and have them make up the stupidest claims "Just looking at a car will give you cancer". Flood the zone with false information, bullshit asymmetry. Lobby the shit out of politicians so they don't care about the issues, only the money it brings in.
The confused regulars in the middle are so propagandized to they no longer know up from down and billionaires laugh all the way to the bank.
Man, why did no one tell the people who invented bronze that they weren’t allowed to do it until they had a correct definition for metals and understood how they worked? I guess the person saying something can’t be done should stay out of the way of the people doing it.
>> I guess the person saying something can’t be done should stay out of the way of the people doing it.
I'll happily step out of the way once someone simply tells me what it is you're trying to accomplish. Until you can actually define it, you can't do "it".
The big tech companies are trying to make machines that replace all human labor. They call it artificial intelligence. Feel free to argue about definitions.
I'm not sure what 'inventing bronze' is supposed to be. 'Inventing' AGI is pretty much equivalent to creating new life, from scratch. And we don't have an idea on how to do that either, or how life came to be.
Definitely not GP, but I think it’s pretty clear that whatever grit there was to have, GP did not have it. “Die an early death due to being overweight or build the grit” is strictly worse than “lose the weight without building the grit, or build the grit”, and it’s even more so when you realize that “or build the grit” was never in the cards. Because then the choice becomes “die an early death or don’t“. Building the grit can be done on other, hopefully less lethal, projects.
Preface: I'm going to sound quite harsh by changing scales, so put your tough skin on before continuing.
This is certainly worse for the individual, but at society scale, the cost being the obvious devaluation of willpower is way too high. Way too high because everything good in that society was built almost exclusively by driven and strong-willed individuals.
I'll give a reply a go - of course we want strong people. That said, we've introduced incredible amounts of weird new things to the world. Advertising, shit food, tech, and a litany of responsibilities. Some of these are very bad and we all paying heavy prices for it.
I don't think we need to treat every bad thing society does as only needing a "toughen up" solution, instead we should fix the root cause.
An extreme example would be if the government poisons your water, maybe some medicine is ok. We should un-poison the water too, but I'm ok with medicine in the meantime.
Then we should start selecting strong willed individuals who do not fit into the “normie” path as those we uphold and show to be role models and examples.
Instead we collectively shit on them and force them into the most useless lifestyles ever devised - effectively pushing paper on rigid schedules or they don’t get to eat.
I’ve thought about this one quite a bit. The world has narrowed a whole lot to define acceptable behavior and who is allowed a seat at the table.
Almost all those “strong willed” individuals of the past who actually built things had lifestyles that would have gotten them entirely shunned from society today.
It’s not impossible but even compared to 30 years ago it’s an entirely different world for such folks. The way I “came up” in life would not be possible today due to the gatekeepers of “respectable society”.
Needing drugs to fit into that incredibly narrow and basic framework of a life should be of no surprise to anyone. Only a few of incredible luck and willpower and probably even naivety will survive that filter.
This whole topic is the epitome of “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome” - entirely predictable, and it’s what society seems to want.
Expanding on what a sibling comment said, we live in an adversarial environment. A successful food product is one you want to eat, whether you need it or not.
Willpower is important, I agree. Almost everyone needing willpower to not eat, though, is a fairly new phenomenon. If anything, the new drugs restore the balance that existed before —and if willpower is a limited resource, actively help society by returning to us what is taken by the relentless grind of profit maximization.
Willpower to not eat really isn't the same as willpower to eat reasonably (in quantity and quality), though. There's even exercise to offset the effects of suboptimal alimentation.
Either willpower is fungible, in which case it doesn’t matter what you use it on because you’re using it up no matter what, or it isn’t, in which case the original point about losing willpower due to leaning on GPL-1 inhibitors for weight loss is mostly invalid, since it wouldn’t affect the willpower to do other things.
The loss I wrote about is society-wide, not for individuals. Weak-willed people won't change, the problem is the damage to people who have willpower but are basically told it doesn't matter.
It's really a matter of incentives and proper valuation.
1. Anthropic should be free to sell its services under whatever legal terms and conditions it wants.
2. The Pentagon should be free to buy those services, negotiate for different terms, refuse to buy those services, and terminate contracts subject to any termination clauses.
You may or may not agree with what the Pentagon wants to do, but if things had stayed there, there would be no real issue.
The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).
Any “explanation” that doesn’t address that is confused itself or trying to confuse the issue.
I leave it to you as to which category the linked source falls under.
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