Translation: "All y'all gonna get sued so hard one day. I'm out, I got paid $74 million last year."

The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment,

I feel that. If I had the means I'd probably fuckoff to some forest cabin at this point.

Good for him. My best years were spent not working and doing my own thing. It’s a shame that for some it only comes in retirement, while others never experience it.

FWIW, Anthropic did just fund a pro-regulation super PAC to oppose OpenAI's/Plantir's pro-Trump/anti-regulation PAC, and:

The Pentagon is at odds with artificial-intelligence developer Anthropic over safeguards that would prevent the government from deploying its technology to target weapons autonomously and conduct U.S. domestic surveillance. Reuters

But I kinda doubt they'll be able to play the good guy for long.

This is literally the plot of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. Interesting that he was able to predict it that far ahead.

I'm going to throw my own thoughts in on this. I got into machine learning around 2015, back when relu activations were still bleeding edge innovations, and got out around 2020 for honestly pretty similar reasons.

Emotions can and have been used as optimisation targets. Engagement is an ever present target. And in the framework of capitalism, one optimisation targets rules above all others; alignment with continued use. It's part of what leads to the bootlicking LLM phenomenon. For the average human, it drives future engagement.

The real danger isn't the newer language models, or anything really to do with neural net architecture; rather, it's the fact that we've found that a simple function minimisation strategy can be used to approximate otherwise intractable functions. The deeper you research, the more clear it becomes that any arbitrary objective can be optimised, given a suitable function approximator and enough data to fit the approximator accurately.

Human minds are also universal function approximators.

Hitzig said a potential “erosion of OpenAI’s own principles to maximise engagement” might already be underway at the firm.

Um, hate to break it to you bud, but there were no principles to erode.

He said he […] move back to the UK to "become invisible".

Literally won’t be happening, but okay.

I said this about capitalism and quit society to be an asshole and drink all day thirty years ago. No regrets.

All the tasty humans get so paranoid about ai and how it might be trying to hide among them and blend in so it can prey on them one by one. Its like lower your temperature my male siblings!

"AI safety" continues to be a grift to promote AI products.

Mrinank Sharma of Anthropic should be remembered as a liar for lines like

The world is in peril. And not just from AI or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment

Despite his letter insisting he's leaving Anthropic to be more honest, he's just regurgitating the same propaganda as before, making promises to mislead investors, and advocating for regulations that don't address any real harms, but will help them monopolize a market.

Must be nice to be able to walk away from 6 figures to study poems.