I like that he comes up with new laws and regulations for AI companies. Can I suggest some more?

- You shall not embed copyrighted material in your models.

- You shall not bombard every little website in existence with 1 million scraping queries per day.

- You shall not use your political influence to pump and dump your AI (or rocket?) company.

- You shall not imperill the whole IT sector by buying all CPU and memory chips.

These new rules will affect every society directly in a positive way. Thanks.

Its hard to read the first half of this as anything other than regulatory capture propaganda. It really all ties together as:

> AI has become a major commercial technology

>Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety

> AI companies that develop advanced AI models must have strong security standards that protect their model weights

Anyway Dario's financial interests aside. This is an interesting breakpoint for me.

> Second, any response to AI-driven job displacement needs to address both the need to provide for everyone economically, and the need for people to find meaning, purpose, and agency. The latter is ultimately more important

To me this reads as an out of touch statement. I think the majority of people on earth work to keep a roof over their heads. Of course work can be a source of meaning, purpose, and agency, but to call it the more important aspect on a societal level is a sort of rich person like Dario statement to make.

> AI companies that develop advanced AI models must have strong security standards that protect their model weights

So, basically, make open-weight models illegal. It's nice for Dario to come out and say this so explicitly.

> A wide range of pro-employment policy incentives can help to slow or reduce job displacement, including: wage insurance policies that compensate people when they have to take a lower-paying job, retention tax incentives to encourage employers not to make layoffs, workforce training grants, or infrastructure to facilitate matching of employers to employees to speed the rate of labor market adaptation. While the particulars of which interventions are best will depend on what kind of labor displacement AI brings, we should readily accept the costs and market inefficiencies that these policies could entail, particularly as they are likely to be offset by AI-driven productivity gains.

People get income from one of three places: capital income, labor income, or the welfare state. If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state. Nothing new need be invented here. Dario’s long and only somewhat organized list of policy interventions makes appropriate preparedness sound like a manic pulling of any and all levers when a simple theory of distribution will suffice.

I know this is likely just for IPO hype but when I read things like this I sometimes wonder if I must be missing something. I use agents everyday and find them really useful and they save me a lot of headache. At the same time I find that if I let it self-direct at a high level at all it generally makes bad choices that cause me headaches later so I can’t really give them autonomy. Enough people seem to believe this exponential line of thinking though that I keep having to wonder: am I the one missing something here? Is there some magic tool that I haven’t found yet that will cure cancer?

It's crazy how all these tech CEOs develop the same sense of ethics that seeks to make the foundation of open research and development that made their efforts possible and may threaten their market position illegal in the name of safety against nebulously-defined risks

It is impressive how well they've scheduled all their releases, posts, and other news to dominate the tech news cycle almost every day in this pre-IPO phase.

While I do understand the risks, I don't understand the solution. Essentially, Dario is saying that powerful model weights can't be distributed (ban open weights), and governments should coordinate and agree on standards, and block any dangerous model from being used at all, with government deciding what dangerous means.

Okay, I don't understand how legitimate access is granted then. Surely, Dario isn't saying to ban Sonnet, because I can definitely make it do cyber harm, as most exploits that I've seen in the wild with my own eyes were trivial.

So the only way I see his proposal working is:

- No open weights, AI is centralized in the hands of few

- We get AI-FAA that sets the rules and monitors

- If I want to do a security scan of my codebase, I get a time and scope limited license from AI-FAA that I upload to claude that will allow it to run the security scan in cloud with their models - Claude Mythos Scanner(TM).

Dario's proposal ultimately requires that people lose direct access to inference via API. Is this why they've been building SaaS clones with AI bolted on?

It's very hard those days to think of companies/people more arrogant than Anthropic/Dario, which is quite the achievement as the bar is very high.

If that arrogance was well placed at least you could somewhat excuse it, but the fact that it is so overtly hypocritical and based on false premises just makes it so much worse.

>The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. This power must be scoped to the above four specific risks and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions.

I feel significantly less sympathy for Anthropic's Supply Chain Risk designation if they believe the government should have this power over them. You get what you sign up for.

I read this essay, and it feels like lying behind a mask of moral responsibility and safety for humanity.

They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money?

Protect your own monopoly, protect your customers' regulations. They want strong regulation like the FAA to raise barriers to entry for the foundation models they themselves build, but then why do they want to loosen FDA regulations? While at the same time driving token consumption from their own customers.

They talk about permanent job displacement and UBI. I usually call this "a morally packaged safe landing."

They are doing something unpopular (destroying jobs) and getting criticized for it. But they do not want to be criticized further, and they want to ask for social sympathy. So they claim a 'noble cause' that everyone can sympathize with and that is safe for themselves

AI will generate astronomical productivity gains and capital profits, which AI companies privatize. So why should the social costs be paid by national taxes? In my opinion, something like "We will donate all of our AI companies' revenue for the next 10 years to society" would show genuine sincerity.

Then they say, if we do not develop AI, China will eat our lunch, and they go after China. But is not this really about preventing Chinese dumping, maintaining our own token prices, and asking the world to beat down China so that they can preserve global tech hegemony?

But by blocking China from the CUDA ecosystem, now the CANN ecosystem has emerged, has it not? If China develops techniques that reliably reduce inference costs, who knows how things will turn out then.

Honestly, I like Anthrpic's Claude, but the Anthropic CEO's rhetoric is so stale. It is not that it feels hypocritical. It is that this is just a one dimensional rhetorical tactic that assumes the public is stupid.

I do not think open source is unconditionally good. (It is good, but it can become bad in all situations or all countrie). Open source itself is a barrier for countries outside the Anglosphere when they want to release IT products. Because there is no incentive to buy a product that is worse than an open source alternative. So I do not think everything necessarily has to be open source.

But this (referring to Anthropic's position) seems to treat people like fools. If regulation is needed, shouldn't they also argue that FDA regulation is needed? I wish they would be consistent

What will be Amodei's job after we have AIs that are better at evrything than humans? Is the AI going to care about our stock exchange playgrounds that reward the future Antropic stock holders?

Regarding regulation: I'm deeply invested in computer vision systems and i fear that policymakers [who are not deeply familiar with the technical distinctions between AI systems] may write broad rules that cover "AI" generally. In that case, computer vision companies and industrial users could end up subject to requirements that were largely motivated by concerns about generative AI and LLMs.

> Often this is for good reasons: governments have grave powers, and it’s usually for the best that they aren’t used too hastily.

"Don't mention the (Iran) War!"

Does this guy have exponential breakfasts?

I agree on some points about the missuse of AI particularly for surveillance, military and propaganda.

But this reads like a post further glazing Mythos, and we are just one or two years away "trust us guys", and similar to Mistral's policy plea "please use AI everywhere or we are going to be left behind".

I had the hardest time accepting one of his first points that LLMs could barely write a line of code 4 years ago.

ChatGPT 3.5 was reasonable at code writing but hallucinated a lot of library functions. Yes we have better harnessing today, and models have been further finetunned with reallife code, but pushing this argument just to support his exponential narrative is deceptive. Like most AI marketing.

> A nation that possesses powerful AI facing one without it—or even facing one that is behind in AI by 3 years—could be the equivalent of an army of World War II Marines facing an army of medieval swordsmen.

This is a somewhat ironic take from someone who very publicly feuded with the US government about whether their AI could be used for waging war.

> As a company, Anthropic always does as much as it can to work with customers to find creative new use cases and new sources of revenue that allow them to do more with their existing workforce, rather than focusing solely on cost savings (which often means reducing the workforce).

Without direct workforce or policymaker representation on the boards of private entities, the private sector will seek to maximize shareholder value even if that means workforce reductions.

It's not clear that any country could realistically ensure that incredibly powerful industries/private sector entities operate perfectly aligned with national interests, short of nationalization.

Large tech companies are already quasi-state actors. In theory, international law and regulations can be binding and enforceable. We see how well that works in practice.

These last few days, I can't help but think that we're now at crossroads that future people will remember as one of two:

- And this were the first steps of Anthropic establishing worldwide corporate technocracy.

- And this is when Anthropic lost and everyone got access to AI.

Similar to how IBM's defeat allowed us to have PCs.

> Members of the trusted coalition should freely share chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) with each other, while working together to deny it to adversaries. US export controls on frontier chips and SME to China have been a major contributor to the US’s overall lead in AI, and these policies need to be expanded, tightened, and coordinated with other likeminded states.

I understand why Dario thinks this is crucial, but it's a very dystopian view of the medium-term future.

I'm not an optimist to the point that I believe that AI will lead to global Star Trek-style utopia (although it theoretically could), but ongoing disparity between "allied" and "enemy" powers relating to hardware technology and software models is both not really possible to enforce in the long term, and a pretty dismal state of global affairs even if successful.

I'd be interested in an expert geopolitical opinion on what the long tail of this would really look like in any sort of reasonable reality.

>AI Exponential

How much of the policy prescription changes if the exponential is actually just a series of sigmoids[1]?

[1]: https://x.com/ylecun/status/1799064075487572133

This guy can’t stay a day without posting something more or less “ban open source AI”. We keep you safe

The only effective action is push back on Athropic.

>> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

-C.S. Lewis

Dario has been riding this exponential for longer than almost anyone here, I’d recommend people try to not scream ‘regulatory capture’ immediately when the risks have indeed materialized and the trend critically does not show any signs of slowing down, in fact the only disagreement is whether it’s accelerating. You have to start thinking in log scales to be able to forecast anything.

"AI is advancing at a lightning pace—in only four years, AI models have gone from barely being able to write a coherent line of code to writing most of the code at major AI companies. Similar gains have been made in biology, physics, math, finance, law, translation, and many other fields."

This is a massive exaggeration. The advancement in the automation of computer code writing has been impressive and is obviously, at least in the short term, changing the software engineering industry substantially. Most other fields have not been affected to nearly the same degree. Certainly not biology, physics, finance, and law (I don't know enough about the math and translation fields to speak to those).

---

"3. Accelerating AI’s positive impact..."

This whole section is the type of thing that often comes out of the mouths of Silicon Valley tech executives without a pharma background. It indicates a thorough lack of understanding of the realities of pharmaceutical research. What he is describing here is removing many of the solid, evidentiary rules that are in place to make sure that the drugs reaching the market actually work and replacing them with proxy predictions. Look, my least favourite part of the job is the animal testing, and I would be hugely grateful if that could be eliminated from the drug discovery pipeline. People have been trying to do that for a long time. But it's extremely difficult. Biology is very, very complicated. Our understanding of how processes in organisms work are vague and approximative. This is not computer code. Even if Anthropic somehow got all of Big Pharma to hand them their proprietary data, it would only scratch the surface of the understanding that is needed to solve these kind of problems. Due to these realities, the program Amodei is describing here would, effectively, open a floodgate of drugs on the market that don't actually do what they are supposed to and are more likely to have unidentified toxicity.

This reads like an AI with an overflowing context window wrote it; or in the alternative it’s a list of statutes written by an arrogant and delusional king. It is this type of arrogance that will lead to an unfavorable reaction by Congress.

https://xcancel.com/cuimao/status/2058458683781365873

Honest question: is there a reason for the naming conventions for these models? Anything that makes it better than giving them names with model numbers, like “Claude 3” or such?

> AI models have gone from barely being able to write a coherent line of code to writing most of the code at major AI companies.

Gasoline has gone from barely being able to power stationary farm machines to now being the fuel that underpins our entire economy. So, great news all around, right?

> which predict an exponential increase

And was that actually delivered?

Real question: If a model goes from 80% accurate to 85% accurate is that an exponential increase in "cognitive capabilities?" Are we considering training costs and effort?

Does it really help to say it's exponential?

People are not in charge, and have not been for some time.

Corporations and governments select their leaders and policies to advance their interests. People fit the work, not vice-versa. Only external competition or internal capabilities limit them (i.e., predation or resources).

External resources have been optimized as profit and exported costs; now that AI replaces the pesky need to source elites, capabilities will expand, which will result in more competition.

Law is not a lot more than settled expectations, and increasing capabilities changes expectations much more than even market disruption and disinformation, so I wouldn't expect law to save us.

As far as I can see, only competition will temper things, and only if AI companies are seen as responsible for their customers' applications - which I doubt. I say this in hope of being proven wrong.

I appreciate the critical perspective on political and economic power, as long as it's consequently followed, and every willingness for cooperation and the creation of fair rules is good.

What makes me doubt that Dario Amodei has really internalized the problem is the lack of humility, the stance that it's just important that the "good guys" keep the technology away from the "bad guys".

If you really want to provide AI with public benefit, you need to prevent power concentration. How? Some unpolished ideas, I'd be happy to hear yours:

- Avoid getting too close to an administration that is openly attacking democracy and is not interested in the benefit of humanity or mutually beneficial cooperation.

- Don't support surveillance. Non-(US-)Americans have human rights and privacy, too. Prepare for a situation where a government tries to convert your compute infrastructure into surveillance infrastructure.

- Support the creation of community data centers. In other words, build data centers together with local communities and make sure they profit from them.

- Advocate for laws that require transparency about resource usage and emissions of data centers.

- If you don't want an AI race, make sure that other countries don't need to fear the US concentrating too much power. Create institutions that can be trusted by other countries, too.

EDIT: I forgot:

- If qualified labor will actually turn out to get devalued, we also need a plan to prevent states from turning into rentier states that don't depend on a well-educated society any longer.

This is weaponization of “word count warfare”. You know, when that colleague pads out their emails and Slack messages and you have to read the whole thing - or worse, put it in another LLM for a summary?

This guy is doing that to government.

Anyone who wishes to meaningfully engage with this content - which is coming from someone powerful whose opinions do matter - must spend (or pay for people to spend) hours getting across it. But that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is that once you do get across it it contains some of the most abhorrent, anti-humanist stuff you can imagine coming out of Silicon Valley.

“We have the best thing, and it knows what you’re using it for, and if you try to use it in ways we don’t like we will silently hide truths from you. Also, those foreigners and all people who work in the open are scary and we need to hide from them instead of competing, so can we please have some laws to protect us.. and also the public?”

And it’s completely shameless!

You would only think this is a good idea if you have access to a country full of sycophants in a datacenter.

This was slightly more thoughtful than I feared it would be. However, what I still do not see in any posts from any of these AI pushers is any genuine consideration of the possibility that the best thing might be for them to do less of what they are currently doing. Not to do it differently. Not to mitigate it. Not to do something else in addition. But to actually reduce their current activities.

Can we not open up every article talking to working professionals as if they’re children?

I like to stay up to date on things but more and more I’m finding myself pointing codex at a URL and saying “get to the point”.

My god this guy is insufferable. Stop mis-using the term exponential

I feel completely baffled by the other responses on this thread. People viewing this purely as a marketing stunt, regulatory capture or attack on their freedoms, with seemingly no appreciation of the real threat that AI could pose to society and even humanity given its current rate of progress.

I'm not going to claim that the CEO of pre-IPO company has no incentive to bolster the claims of his tech, but to completely disregard everything he is saying based on that seems awfully binary.

I don't know whether people are just high on copium, spouting "it's just fancy autocomplete" or "only humans can really be creative" on every LLM-related thread, but it is impossible to deny that in a span of a few years we've gone from models that could barely put together a sentence, to something maybe not equivalent to a junior developer, but at least resembling it.

And sure, you can point out every flaw that current day LLMs have, just how everyone pointed out that Stable Diffusion couldn't generate accurate hands (until it could 6 months later!). But the gradient is pretty clear and I am yet to see a well-argued narrative from anyone why scaling laws should fail in the next year or two (by which point it feels like we're going to have a real problem, extrapolating the current trajectory).

I'm very glad this discussion is at least being had, and I wish everyone would get off their high-horse and take things a bit more seriously.

Of all the points, I find only this one fair: Dario is making it hard for competitor startups to come up because he's proposing additional regulations.

A good proposal here is: should Anthropic and OpenAI become sort of VC's that fund other competitors?

How predictable. The company currently on top wishes to use the regulatory power of the state to prevent competitors from encroaching on their market dominance. It’s a tail as old as time, although their CEO’s rarely publish blog posts about it.

I have to be honest, I am tired of reading these arrogant, self-absorbed posts from Dario and Anthropic in general. Opening with this lord of the rings reference just feels like they are trying too hard and are untrustworthy.

As annoying as their tone is, the real big danger is what they are setting up for. All this fear-mongering around Mythos, the overly aggressive controls on Fable, and these manifestos they keep writing, are part of setting up for REGULATORY CAPTURE. Even collaborating with the Pope and the Interfaith Alliance (https://iafsc.org/our-work/faith-ai-covenant) are part of creating a vast support network for regulations and restrictions. Those regulations will help those faith organizations or the government or whatever, but will also help Anthropic’s bottom line.

Those regulations will not support your civil liberties. They will restrict speech, access to AI, and allowed uses of AI. They will lead to bans on use of models from some countries like China, and also bans on open-source or open-weight models.

If Dario wants to be trusted, he needs to explicitly say in writing that Anthropic will not support any legal or regulatory restrictions on open-source AI, open-weight AI, or Chinese models. Otherwise, what he is really saying - even as he claims he is trying to ‘defend democracy’ - is that he and Anthropic do not truly support fundamental rights like our right to speech.

It’s not just Anthropic either. OpenAI had their own recent polemic, pushing for regulations like mandatory safety reviews by agencies for “frontier” models (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48387246). It’s a dead giveaway that these companies have no moats, are in serious danger of being a commodity, and are now in the process of using regulations and enshittification to hold onto money and power.

I think we should treat this with smirking suspicions until their IPO happens.

"Democracies should seek to form a global coalition centered on building AI according to their common values, iteratively trying to draw in the rest of the world by making it more and more attractive to be part of the coalition and less and less attractive to be outside it."

It's not clear to me on which side of the coalition USA is meant to be in this divide. And as an European I'm not sure whether being in China's or USA's coalition is better in the long term.

In general, this deliberate mongering of ever more geopolitical division is extremely harmful. As is the Trump bootlicking.

Sit back and watch the stock market implode as these lot double down on safety theatre. The hype is coming to an end.

[flagged]

AI is a lethal risk to mankind and should be totally rolled back for a century of close research before we try again.

The comments here. They make me feel that we are so doomed.

We all want to nuclear codes so badly. We are addicted to intelligence and labour so badly that we simply can't concieve that a pro-social actor might want us all not to have it, and for good reason.

I mean... Obviously, insiders like Oppenheimer (who dedicated their lives to considering the implications of the technology under discussion), they just feared nuclear proliferation because they wanted all the profits for themselves, right :(

What about punishment on AI exponential for security failures, electric chairs for CEO of high ranked frontier models that gets jailbroken by geopolitical adversaries.