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It’s practically impossible to run a big AI company ethically: Anthropic was supposed to be the good guy. It can’t be — unless government changes the incentives in the industry. (www.vox.com)

submitted 3 months ago by tardigrada@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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The best clue might come from a 2022 paper written by the Anthropic team back when their startup was just a year old. They warned that the incentives in the AI industry — think profit and prestige — will push companies to “deploy large generative models despite high uncertainty about the full extent of what these models are capable of.” They argued that, if we want safe AI, the industry’s underlying incentive structure needs to change.

Well, at three years old, Anthropic is now the age of a toddler, and it’s experiencing many of the same growing pains that afflicted its older sibling OpenAI. In some ways, they’re the same tensions that have plagued all Silicon Valley tech startups that start out with a “don’t be evil” philosophy. Now, though, the tensions are turbocharged.

An AI company may want to build safe systems, but in such a hype-filled industry, it faces enormous pressure to be first out of the gate. The company needs to pull in investors to supply the gargantuan sums of money needed to build top AI models, and to do that, it needs to satisfy them by showing a path to huge profits. Oh, and the stakes — should the tech go wrong — are much higher than with almost any previous technology.

So a company like Anthropic has to wrestle with deep internal contradictions, and ultimately faces an existential question: Is it even possible to run an AI company that advances the state of the art while also truly prioritizing ethics and safety?

“I don’t think it’s possible,” futurist Amy Webb, the CEO of the Future Today Institute, told me a few months ago.

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[–] sweng@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago

there is no way to do the equivalent of banning armor piercing rounds with an LLM or making sure a gun is detectable by metal detectors - because as I said it is non-deterministic. You can’t inject programmatic controls.

Of course you can. Why would you not, just because it is non-deterministic? Non-determinism does not mean complete randomness and lack of control, that is a common misconception.

Again, obviously you can't teach an LLM about morals, but you can reduce the likelyhood of producing immoral content in many ways. Of course it won't be perfect, and of course it may limit the usefulness in some cases, but that is the case also today in many situations that don't involve AI, e.g. some people complain they "can not talk about certain things without getting cancelled by overly eager SJWs". Society already acts as a morality filter. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Free-speech maximslists exist, but are a minority.