Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, seems to have put the cat among the generatively artificially intelligent pigeons. In his blog he has written a 19,000 word essay entitled "The Adolescence of Technology."
Within hours of hearing about this posting, I had already come across to references to it in the news media: one in the Guardian, and another in The Atlantic Monthly. Both had predictably overblown headlines. The general implication was that Anthropic had gone off its rocker, and we were all facing the AI apocalypse (presumably by Singularity).
In fact, if you read the actual essay, rather than the news reports about it, it is a reasonable piece of thinking, if not writing, and it is heartening to see that the CEO of a large language model company would be considering these issues. Even at 19,000 words (the size of a small novella more than an essay) the article is not quite comprehensive, and there are a few topics that I wish he had considered. But it is heartening to know that he sees that there are risks, and risks beyond the mere existence of the technology, and the risks of concentration of wealth quite apart from the technology. I do think that he is more optimistic about the potential outcomes then is actually warranted by the current situation, and I strongly suspect that he is also optimistic about the time frame for actually achieving a realistic artificial intelligence, but that is only to be expected from someone who leads a major artificial intelligence company. I do think that he is just a wee bit glib about the specific protections that Anthropic has, itself, put into place in order to prevent its incipient artificial intelligences from escaping or doing us harm. But that's probably a matter of opinion anyway, and, again, voicing other opinions might get him in trouble with stockholders.
I would recommend that anyone who is interested, one way or another, in artificial intelligence, and particularly generative artificial intelligence, to read the actual essay as opposed to the news reports about it.
(Given both the title and the topic, I can't help but wonder whether Amodei has read "The Adolescence of P-1.")
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