Knowing a couple people who work at Anthropic or in their particular flavour of AI Safety, I think you would be surprised how sincere they are about existential AI risk. Many safety researchers funnel into the company, and the Amodei's are linked to Effective Altruism, which also exhibits a strong (and as far as I can tell, sincere) concern about existential AI risk. I personally disagree with their risk analysis, but I don't doubt that these people are serious.
replyI'd challenge that if you think they're fearmongering but don't see what they can gain from it (I agree it shows no obvious benefit for them), there's a pretty high probability they're not fearmongering.
replyYou really don't see how they can monetarily gain from "our models are so advance they keep trying to trick us!"? Are tech workers this easily mislead nowadays?
replyReminds me of how scammers would trick doctors into pumping penny stocks for a easy buck during the 80s/90s.
I know why they do it, that was a rhetorical question!
replyCorrect. Anthropic keeps pushing these weird sci-fi narratives to maintain some kind of mystique around their slightly-better-than-others commodity product. But Occam’s Razor is not dead.
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