Anthropic is planning to grow. They’re aiming to be one of the “top players”, competitive with OpenAI and Deepmind, working with a similar level of advanced models. They have received outsideinvestment, because keeping up with state of the art is expensive, and going to get moreso. They’ve recently been hiring for a product team, in order to get more red-teaming of models and eventually have more independent revenue streams.
I think Anthropic believes that this is the most promising route to making AGI turn out well for humanity, so it’s worth taking the risk of being part of the competition and perhaps contributing to accelerating capabilities. Alternatively stated, Anthropic leadership believes that you can’t solve the problem of aligning AGI independently from developing AGI.
See for example this summary of someone who spent quite a lot of time trying to understand and pass the ITT of Anthropic’s strategy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MNpBCtmZmqD7yk4q8/my-understanding-of-anthropic-strategy
Do you believe in it?
Just seems weird if someone said “to be safe from a deadly disease, what we really need is to develop it as soon as we can”
I get that the metaphore has holes, just, seems a bit “out there”.
I’d say that “to have safe agi, we need to do agi engineering the fastest way possible” is a very extraordinary claim.
It requires very extraordinary evidence to support it.
My thing which is “can we ask them to explain it” seems like a very ordinary claim to me.
So it doesn’t require much evidence at all.