I have many issues with this change. Commenters on LessWrong have already said most everything I wanted to say but it hasn’t been said on EAF yet, so I’ll quote a couple excerpts from comments that captured my biggest concerns.
But it’s been easy to get the impression that the RSP is “binding ourselves to the mast” and committing to unilaterally pause AI development and deployment under some conditions, and Anthropic is responsible for that.
[Habryka gives a public example of one such conversation]
This was, in my experience, routine[1]. I therefore do see this switch from “RSP as concrete if-then-commitments” to “RSP as positive milestone setting” to constitute a meaningful breaking of a promise. Yes, the RSP always said in its exact words that Anthropic could revise it, but people who said that condition would trigger were frequently dismissed and insulted as in the comment above.
And to be clear, I think this is a huge deal! My experience interfacing with Anthropic on RSP-adjacent topics has been pretty universally terrible, with a very routine experience of being gaslit (with the exception of interfacing specifically with you, Holden, on this topic, where your comments have seemed clear and reasonable and consistent across time to me).
I am glad to see this post as a kind of reckoning with many of these bad implicit promises, but at some point Anthropic has failed so many times to set reasonable expectations, and has acted so many times adversarially to people trying to get clarity on commitments, that it becomes very hard to have any kind of non-adversarial relationship to it. I do think this post helps, and I hope it might open up better and less adversarial future communications.
If there were strong and broad political will for treating AI like nuclear power and slowing it down arbitrarily much to keep risks low, the situation might be different. But that isn’t the world we’re in now, and I fear that “overreaching” can be costly.
I think it would make a nontrivial contribution to that ‘strong and broad political will’ if Dario were to come out and say “actually, sorry about all that deliberate Overton-window-closing I did in previous writings. In fact, political will is not a totally exogenous oh-well thing, but it is the responsibility of frontier developers to inculcate that political will by telling the public that a pause is possible and desirable, instead of a dumb lame thing not even worth considering. So now we’re saying loud and clear: a pause is possible and desirable, and the world should work toward it as a Plan A!”
I’m being deliberately cartoonish here, but you get the point. If incentives are forcing Anthropic to abandon things that are good for human survival––which occurrence was, no offense, completely obvious from day one––Anthropic should be screaming from the rooftops, Help!! Incentives are forcing us to abandon things that are good for human survival!!
If this is a crux for you––if you/Anthropic think a pause is so undesirable/unlikely that it’s important for the safety of the human race to publicly disparage the possibility of a pause (as Dario opens many of his essays by doing)––please say so! Otherwise, this lily-livered, disingenuous, “oh no, the incentives! it’s a shame incentives can never be changed!” moping will give us all an undignified death.
Quoting myself: The main thing that saddened me about this post isn’t Anthropic breaking and weakening its commitments—that was expected to happen. It’s that Holden seems to be adopting the same shirking-of-responsibility stance on government regulations that Dario has been taking for a while.
I have many issues with this change. Commenters on LessWrong have already said most everything I wanted to say but it hasn’t been said on EAF yet, so I’ll quote a couple excerpts from comments that captured my biggest concerns.
Habryka:
MalcolmMcLeod:
Quoting myself: The main thing that saddened me about this post isn’t Anthropic breaking and weakening its commitments—that was expected to happen. It’s that Holden seems to be adopting the same shirking-of-responsibility stance on government regulations that Dario has been taking for a while.