I understand the sentiment, but for me it would be dangerously close to moral offsetting, which I am not fan of.
E.g. animal welfare activist might say “eating factory farm meat in random restaurants saves me some time, which I am using to help animals”. Or “eating meat is okay, because I am saving much more animals by donating to ACE recommended charities or something”.
I think naive math checks out, but slightly broader conception of ethics would discourage such reasoning.
But to be more constructive, I subscribed to Antrophic’s Claude. Claude Opus should be on similar level as GPT4 and I have much more trust in the company (but I am ready to abandon them if they fail to live up my safety expectations).
But there is a lot of smaller companies that can do a lot with smaller models like Llama, like https://www.phind.com/, mainly targeted for coding. Companies like those don’t have huge AI ambitions, they are just (very well) leveraging current technology provided by big players to make an useful product.
To be clear, I am in favor of promoting offsetting in both contexts, although the benefits of veganism in avoiding contributing to factory farming demand, increasing demand for pro-social vegan products, and sending an important moral signal make it difficult to calculate an appropriate sum. Further, I think a deontological or virtue ethics concern with killing or eating the flesh of sentient beings also naturally arises.
In the case here though, your choices cash out in terms of your effect on X and S risks re AGI. I think an appropriate offset for the funding effect is able to reverse or more than reverse your effect without moral complication.
I understand the sentiment, but for me it would be dangerously close to moral offsetting, which I am not fan of. E.g. animal welfare activist might say “eating factory farm meat in random restaurants saves me some time, which I am using to help animals”. Or “eating meat is okay, because I am saving much more animals by donating to ACE recommended charities or something”.
I think naive math checks out, but slightly broader conception of ethics would discourage such reasoning.
But to be more constructive, I subscribed to Antrophic’s Claude. Claude Opus should be on similar level as GPT4 and I have much more trust in the company (but I am ready to abandon them if they fail to live up my safety expectations).
But there is a lot of smaller companies that can do a lot with smaller models like Llama, like https://www.phind.com/, mainly targeted for coding. Companies like those don’t have huge AI ambitions, they are just (very well) leveraging current technology provided by big players to make an useful product.
To be clear, I am in favor of promoting offsetting in both contexts, although the benefits of veganism in avoiding contributing to factory farming demand, increasing demand for pro-social vegan products, and sending an important moral signal make it difficult to calculate an appropriate sum. Further, I think a deontological or virtue ethics concern with killing or eating the flesh of sentient beings also naturally arises.
In the case here though, your choices cash out in terms of your effect on X and S risks re AGI. I think an appropriate offset for the funding effect is able to reverse or more than reverse your effect without moral complication.