The below are truthful statements, out of the very mouths of these founders of Anthropic, the AI IPO darling in the making — at the moment. It is wildly highly levered, from a financial point of view (think: risk of a sinking ship, with AI running rogue — what will it NOT do, to preserve itself?) — and the entire crew seems to be unaware — of their own cognitive and operational limitations.
My only real comment is… “What is wrong with kids, these days?!” Heh. [Didn’t any of them see the “Terminator” series of movies?]
Here’s the prospectus in red herring form:
…There are four broad categories of risk: misuse, loss of control, authoritarian abuse, and economic disruption.
Al can be misused by those who wish to do harm, for example to conduct cyberattacks or to design biological weapons. We have strict guardrails and trusted access programs that are designed to block misuse of our technology while still enabling positive applications. We regularly shut down attempts to misuse our models, report them to law enforcement when appropriate, and endeavor to transparently disclose them to the public.
Al may also behave autonomously in ways we (and our users) do not intend — as illustrated by recent high-profile cybersecurity incidents. Losing control of sufficiently powerful Al systems could be a global security threat of the first order. Anthropic has pioneered a number of methods for improving the control of our Al systems. These include mechanistic interpretability, which allows us to look inside Al models and try to understand how they behave, and constitutional training, which allows us to train Al models to act in line with a specific written document — Claude’s constitution. We also publish model system cards that run to hundreds of pages, designed to give the public visibility into our progress on model safety. It has long been our practice to disclose incidents and publish research findings that help mitigate against this risk across the industry.
Authoritarian governments may use Al to create high-tech surveillance states, deepen repression, and make themselves much more difficult to dislodge. We are committed to working with free societies to provide a counterweight to authoritarian abuse and to promote freedom and democracy.
Finally, the incredible economic value of Al may come with economic disruption, similar to what has happened with previous technologies but greater in magnitude. We are committed to studying this disruption-we maintain an economic index that provides aggregated information about Claude’s usage across the economy, and our researchers build macroeconomic models to predict the possible future impact of AI. We also suspect more radical actions will be needed and have already committed $200 million to partner with governments to run studies on different ways of responding to changes in the economy. We do this to find evidence about which types of interventions are effective, so that if society does encounter economic disruption, we will have helped build and de-risk the right tools to use in the response.
We expect to scale up this funding significantly in the future. We consider it our personal responsibility to help the world understand these risks, to prevent or mitigate them when they arise from our Al models, and to work with governments and the rest of the industry to address them at a societal level….
Look — I am an avowed capitalist, technologist and believer in scientific progress. But I still think there are some times (exceedingly rare cases where)… we ought not trust a gaggle of about 25 year old MBAs from the elites to have an unchecked free hall pass.
And this is… one of them. See — “Oppenheimer” — or T2. Or even Jurassic Park I. Out.
नमस्ते
