alt Hacker NewsIn the first paragraph,
> Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure,
Later (on banning chip sales to china)
> we should crack down on the rampant smuggling and workarounds used to obtain access to such chips.
If you truly believe that bans don't work, the same applies to hardware too.
Furthermore, Dario says later "To address these concerns, I do support the following three measures...": 1. ban chip sales to China 2. crack down on distillation 3. all capable models should go through mandatory safety testing
Just so happens that all these moves commercially benefit Anthropic. If Dario really wanted to make a point, it would land a lot better had Anthropic released a single open-weights model
Replies
> If you truly believe that bans don't work, the same applies to hardware too.
No, software and hardware are different. You can very plausibly prevent smuggling of physical objects, and you very obviously cannot prevent smuggling/diffusion of open source bits-on-disk.
At this point, Anthropic releasing a sonnet 4.x class open weights model would be a positive PR move that doesn’t affect their bottom line.
Exactly, the letter will make much more sense if they are releasing open weight models and China is distilling their models and keep them in secrets for evil purpose
Banning software/data from being put on the internet vs banning GPU hardware is fundamentally different though, isn't it?
Banning hardware and banning software are very different things, and the latter is orders of magnitude easier than the former. Physical and non-physical things are different!
Carl Wheezer from Temu, what a clown...
>all these moves commercially benefit Anthropic.
From a new "fast" company arising, you can sometimes see the way that before it started up there was nothing but "narrative" and that is what established the initial business model since there was nothing else yet. After some momentum is gained whether there is a pivot or not then the narrative going forward has to be aligned with the now more-well-proven business model.
From his leadership standpoint there are 3 big recommendations right now. That's what this message is all about.
>We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China
Well you and who else?
If there's not already somebody who is compromising the well-being of a nation in exchange for a handful of gold, with the ever-incresing glorification of greed & dishonesty at all costs it's only a matter of time for this one.
>We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations. Distillation is a much more compute-efficient process
Wait a minute, what's always been needed by everybody are more compute-efficient processes for everything. I've mentioned this before and it's been a while but back in 1980 it took less than a year to figure out I was going to need other chips that were not regular CPUs if I was going to get the most intelligent response from the silicon on a single square-foot of PCB. At the same time it was obvious you were never going to get far without what they now call "distillation", especially with only kilobytes of memory. Otherwise you would be wasting such stupidly large amounts of memory & storage there was no way you could really call it "intelligent". Now with ML & AI on the rise again there are so many people more deeply immersed than ever, and nothing has really contradicted these basic concepts yet, which have been easily recognizable since like forever.
>All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing. The best way to address threat #2 is to just directly test models for cyber, biological, and alignment risks before release.
Righteous concept, and I'm always in favor of 100x the amount of testing in general normally done.
But "just" test says it pretty well, and those who are gifted enough to "draw the rest of the owl" freehand can test things the most skillfully until they are blue in the face. It's not going to help if an adversary decides not to test, or to enhance these exact things so it can have some kind of competitive advantage. Amodei does not ignore this and there is a footnote about it.
People realize that some of the elements that are coming to mind were expressed in some fairly early "science-fiction" so all this is nothing new
Still looking for the most intelligent responses I can get, since way before 1980 ;)
TL;DR: We like money, and Anthropic should stay in a position to make loads of it despite any competition.
Bans on Chinese open weight models being used in the US and bans on AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment being exported to China are two extremely different things, and it's not inconsistent in any way to oppose one and endorse another.