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Wisconsin, USA
Joined March 2021
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Charlie Robertstad retweeted
Busted
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon became a media superstar after going public with his AI fears. He insisted that he wasn’t working with any third party organizations. Familiar sources told us a different story: DEY., a PR firm representing many of the most prominent AI safetyists, was booking his interviews.
One source, who had direct knowledge, even said DEY. preemptively booked Nate Soares, a prominent AI safety figure, for interviews that directly overlapped with Jacob going public.
Jacob working with DEY. is notable for two reasons: first, as mentioned, he previously said he wasn’t working with third parties. Second, we are in the middle of a national conversation about the future of AI that is actively determining how we regulate the most powerful technology in the world, largely thanks to the panic stirred up by Jacob — and it’s in the public’s interest to know who, exactly, is behind it.
Scoop from @huntryerson 👇
Futureproof transportation:
Pair the @Tesla Cybercab with an analog Runabout Truck from @reoindustries and its as near a complete transportation nexus as you could want.
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If AI in its current centralized form is a typological "Tower of Babel" (i.e. consolidated and homogeneous body of knowledge) one vector of it's collapse model would be the following sequence:
1) the realization on the part of SMEs that every instance they use a frontier model to assist with their cutting-edge research is an instance where AI will complete the (hopefully) breakthrough insight amd therefore justify its own existence as dominant scientific lead.
2) the natural response of disenfranchised SMEs who may have taken longer to achieve said breakthrough on their own (or perhaps with local AI models) but will do so for the sake of their own individual credit and reward.
3) As less and less cutting-edge research is pursued on frontier models they will begin to lose relevance leading to a more fractured or decentralized implementation.
"Do not muzzle the ox that treads the grain" is not a Proverb current frontier AI is equipped to support.
Consequences will follow.
Local and private AI models will win.
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Charlie Robertstad retweeted
Babel is a cautionary tale. It is more properly understood as a pre-collapse motif like Icarus.
This is why decentralized, local, open-weight, and bespoke AI models and implementations are the only correct solution that will stand ling-term.
Charlie Robertstad retweeted
Two of the reporters on the byline are funded by the Tarbell Center, an AI doomer org controlled by Kamala Harris megadonor Dustin Moskovitz. Tarbell gives journalists large grants to insert AI doomer stories into prominent outlets. @TIME did not disclose the affiliation.
Icarus called for an (altitude) development slowdown - a pause even - but only when the wax had already begun to soften
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.
What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.
Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.
It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.
Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.
It starts with METR.
Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.
He proposes METR for this purpose.
But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.
Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.
And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.
This stock was worth $500 million early last year.
It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.
METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.
Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.
But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.
The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.
The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.
If this were the end of it, that's bad.
But that isn't all.
The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.
The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.
They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.
All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.
As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.
Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.
From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.
This itself is an objective fact.
The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.
But the problem also goes in the other direction:
If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.
Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.
Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.
They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.
And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.
What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.
The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.
And that feedback loop is winning.
That's what Jacob Coxon is.
China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.
America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.
Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.
Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.
It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.
Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.
Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.
Congress must investigate.
Evidence and Github in next post.
Then some supplementary figures.
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"closed-weights = exempt from the bill"
No subtlety at all on the part of the corrupt elite - trying to use AI as a Trojan Horse to patch their sinking ship...
What a time to be alive.
🚨1/The bill Bernie Sanders introduced was drafted in London.🇬🇧
Its drafter, ControlAI, admitted it to TIME. Its funder — sole publicly named — is Jaan Tallinn, who led Anthropic’s Series A and sits on Anthropic’s board as an observer.
Neither Sanders nor the UK sponsor disclosed it.
🧵👇
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Nice. Unmask the duplicitous motives of OpenAI and Anthropic:
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
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Correct
The perfect timing and sequence of events this week has been extremely sus:
1) Harry Doomer unknown random guy algo boosted post to 120M+ views
2) Dem politicians same day fearmongering about AI everywhere
3) MSM picking it up an amplifying it
4) Nate Soares (MIRI) on Tucker
5) UK regulators signing letter to ban ASI
6) The Dario letter asking for Doomer NGOs to have soft power everywhere and asking for world government
We are watching a full-spectrum coordinated campaign to engineer a crisis, manufacture consent for the response, and turn engineered public fear into regulatory capture, indelible institutional power, and unprecedented government control over the future of the most important technology since the dawn of man.
Whether we cave to this engineered pressure and give up our freedoms will determine our collective fate, and whether we live in centrally controlled restrictive future, or remain a free civilization.
We must choose wisely.
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