Dario takes it on the chin
His reputation is crashing
Remember this essay from March?
There are no heroes in commercial AI
As bad as Sam Altman is, Dario Amodei isn’t all that different.
A lot of people have come around to that view:
You can read the full story—which reviews a wide range of concerns, from business practices to a sentiment that the doomerism has been overdone to concerns about whether Anthropic is trying to kneecap competitors—here. For many, the turning point seems to be the events of the last few days, when much of the industry but not Anthropic came out vigorously for “open-weight” models (which can be downloaded, given sufficient hardware, but which are not fully open source, because e.g. their training sets are generally not publicly available). Many signed a letter; Amodei instead issued a statement explaining his resistance, which many saw as tone-deaf and self-serving, in part because the statement called for locking down distillation by competitors even as it just came out that the company has been destroying rare books in bulk in order to distill their contents.
I found myself (somewhat unusually) heartily agreeing with David Sacks:
All told, it would appear that most of the goodwill that Amodei accumulated in standing up to Hegseth has dissipated, much as most of the goodwill towards Altman eventually did.
Maybe one or the other, Altman or Amodei, will regain the public’s trust, but it is far from obvious that they will. In Altman’s case, I think dishonesty and lack of candor is the core issue; with good reason, people just don’t trust him anymore. For Amodei, who maybe means well, I think the issue is more one of tone deafness and self-certainty, coupled with a tendency to present arguments that frequently appear self-serving.
With apologies for the AI slop (the text at the bottom is particularly hilarious), I made a meme in their honor. Coming soon: a guy who could sell refrigerators to Eskimos (probably lying about their future benefits) versus a guy who often seems unable to read a room:
More seriously, the same WSJ article noted above reports that “Technologists and policymakers say they are also concerned about the AI race turning into a duopoly, with Anthropic and OpenAI essentially emerging as dominant players that control the market.”
Given how damaging AI could ultimately be, we need people we can fully trust, and I don’t think we have that.
P.S. I started a poll on X an hour ago. It’s not remotely scientific of course, but the early returns are pretty clear. The good news (for Dario) is that they prefer him to Sam 2:1; the bad news is the vast majority of respondents don’t trust either of them.
Am I the only one who thinks that spending a few trillion dollars to prop up a couple companies run by people hardly anyone trusts is bonkers?
the AI (ChatGPT) generated the error (and several others if you like carefully) and I thought it was funny so let it stand. the prompt [make a movie poster for “The Alienator vs The Deceiver”; the first guy should like Dario Amodei, the second like Sam Altman] didn’t ask for it.
The destruction of rare books is a Crime Against Humanity, the apotheosis of Greed, the Hydrogen Bomb to literary culture... Dario and Sam, as well as many other tech titans, are in the thrall of their toys, driven by the lust for power... "to have dominion." What if paintings and sculptures are next on the digitize agenda? They already are being plagiarized.