alt Hacker News> There's so much good stuff in this post.
The post starts off so cynical. I know a few people at anthropic and oai and the simplest explanation also matches my observations that they actually believe what they say. That agents will be doing the bulk of the programming in the not so distant future. They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point.
They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.
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> I know a few people at anthropic and oai
> They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.
Unless you know the senior execs in charge of marketing at these companies I don't know how you can make that assertion. I believe that a lot of the folks at these companies earnestly believe in the work they are doing. But a belief held by software engineers is not automatically shared by the marketing department, nor by senior execs.
"Anthropic is a giant company with a lot at stake and will seek to capitalize on any marketing opportunity" doesn't strike me as cynical so much as a statement of fact.
> They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point.
now THAT is cynical
I'm sure that Jehovah's Witnesses believe what they say. But thats not a reason to let them in my house.
Then they are naive. I've seen this a lot first hand during my PhD. Interpreting results in a way that reinforces their beliefs and ignores alternate hypotheses.
Frequently, those alternative hypotheses are demonstrated to be true. For example, "emergence" as was researched and proclaimed by many labs, including places like OpenAI and Anthropic is due to using too few discrete steps in sampling a continuous phenomenon. See "Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?" [1] for example.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004