Counterpoint on market sentiment: Anthropic raised a $124M Series A with few staff and no public facing product. The money comes from a handful of individuals including Jaan Tallin and Eric Schmidt, which makes unusual beliefs more likely to govern the bid (think unilateralist’s curse). But this seems like it has to be a financial bet on the possibility of incredible AI progress.
Separate question: Anthropic seems to be composed largely of people from OpenAI, another well-funded and socially-minded AGI company. Why did they leave OpenAI?
I think market sentiment is a bit complicated. Very few investors are talking about AGI, but organizations like OpenAI still seem to think that talking about AGI is good marketing for them (for talent, and I’m sure for money, later on).
I think most of the Anthropic investment was from people close to effective altruism: Jaan Tallinn, Dustin Moskovitz, and Center for Emerging Risk Research, for example. https://www.anthropic.com/news/announcement
On why those people left OpenAI, I’m not at all an expert here. I think it’s common for different teams to have different ways of seeing things, and wanting independence. In this case, I think there weren’t all too many reasons to stay part of the same org (it’s easy enough to get funding independently, as is evidenced by the Anthropic funding). I guess if Anthropic stayed close to OpenAI, it could have been part of scaling GPT-3 and similar, but I’m not sure how valuable that was to the rest of the team (especially in comparison to having more freedom to do things their own ways). I’d note that right now, there seem to be several more technical alignment focused people at Anthropic.
Counterpoint on market sentiment: Anthropic raised a $124M Series A with few staff and no public facing product. The money comes from a handful of individuals including Jaan Tallin and Eric Schmidt, which makes unusual beliefs more likely to govern the bid (think unilateralist’s curse). But this seems like it has to be a financial bet on the possibility of incredible AI progress.
Separate question: Anthropic seems to be composed largely of people from OpenAI, another well-funded and socially-minded AGI company. Why did they leave OpenAI?
I think market sentiment is a bit complicated. Very few investors are talking about AGI, but organizations like OpenAI still seem to think that talking about AGI is good marketing for them (for talent, and I’m sure for money, later on).
I think most of the Anthropic investment was from people close to effective altruism: Jaan Tallinn, Dustin Moskovitz, and Center for Emerging Risk Research, for example.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/announcement
On why those people left OpenAI, I’m not at all an expert here. I think it’s common for different teams to have different ways of seeing things, and wanting independence. In this case, I think there weren’t all too many reasons to stay part of the same org (it’s easy enough to get funding independently, as is evidenced by the Anthropic funding). I guess if Anthropic stayed close to OpenAI, it could have been part of scaling GPT-3 and similar, but I’m not sure how valuable that was to the rest of the team (especially in comparison to having more freedom to do things their own ways). I’d note that right now, there seem to be several more technical alignment focused people at Anthropic.