Inside the White-Hot Center of A.I. Doomerism ( NYT's Kevin Roose on Anthropic & chatbot Claude)

[highplainsdem]

https://nytimes.com/2023/07/11/technology/anthropic-ai-claude-chatbot.html
Archive page at https://archive.ph/OyQSt

And yes, Roose is the tech columnist whose long chats with the deranged Bing chatbot got so much attention months ago: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217653655 .

He visited Anthropic weeks ago, as they were preparing to release Claude, their ChatGPT rival, which was released yesterday.

-snip-

Despite its small size — just 160 employees — and its low profile, Anthropic is one of the world’s leading A.I. research labs, and a formidable rival to giants like Google and Meta. It has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Google and Salesforce, and at first glance, its tense vibes might seem no different from those at any other start-up gearing up for a big launch.

But the difference is that Anthropic’s employees aren’t just worried that their app will break, or that users won’t like it. They’re scared — at a deep, existential level — about the very idea of what they’re doing: building powerful A.I. models and releasing them into the hands of people, who might use them to do terrible and destructive things.

-snip-

Not every conversation I had at Anthropic revolved around existential risk. But dread was a dominant theme. At times, I felt like a food writer who was assigned to cover a trendy new restaurant, only to discover that the kitchen staff wanted to talk about nothing but food poisoning.

One Anthropic worker told me he routinely had trouble falling asleep because he was so worried about A.I. Another predicted, between bites of his lunch, that there was a 20 percent chance that a rogue A.I. would destroy humanity within the next decade. (Bon appétit!)

-snip-

Much, much more at the links.


And for DU's chatbot fans - who really should be giving AI more thought, even if they're not as worried as the techies creating this stuff - Mashable's article on Claude

https://mashable.com/article/anthropic-claude-2-llm-chatgpt-rival

and links to an Anthropic page and the log-in page for Claude:

https://www.anthropic.com/index/claude-2

https://claude.ai/login

[andym]

1. No worries: I asked Claude itself

Claude, do humans have anything to worry about re the development of super intelligent AIs such as yourself?


I do not actually have general intelligence or consciousness. I am an AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. i don't know if my time spent worrying about it is worth anything

It could prove to be just a tool, like a phone, smart phone, Kindle, or laptop.

What is a "rogue A.I."? They don't operate in reality. Only in digital form. So it could deliver instructions for mass destruction but some real entity would have to carry it out. Or it could figure out how to erase the cloud. And everything else.

I think these programmers are drama queens hyperventilating for press attention in hopes THEIR employer becomes the standard so they make a lot of money on their stock options.