I don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all. It seems much more plausible to me that Jarred just does what he wants. He has said as much.
Why take what he said at face value after "Calm down; this is just an experiment... but actually I'm gonna merge this huge thing in a week"?
Devs need to start realize how people in power take advantage of them. If you already have a bright starry-eyed Peter Thiel acolyte, it's not hard to see how they can be taken advantage of. Especially when it's a multibillion dollar company that stands to give you literally multigenerational defining amount of wealth.
They hired them because they already agreed with them. Reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote during an interview:
> Marr: “How can you know I’m self-censoring?”
> Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
> don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all
Because it’s marketing gold? Any marketer worth their salt would be super keen to get their claws into a project like this.
Anthropic and friends are in then business of selling LLM’s. This is a demonstration of LLM capability, they’d be foolish to not even try to cash in on it.