Yet another Hacker News

Microsoft says AI rival Anthropic could have 'disastrous impact' on humanity

36 points pluc 1 hour ago 43 comments

prologic 1 hour ago | parent

First, OpenAI runs around screaming and yelling for OSS (and Chinese) models to be regulated and banned. Then Anthropic yells and screams the sky(net) is falling and going to kill us all, let's regulate and ensure AI has built in kill switches. And... Now Microsoft's turn. The rivalry is honestly becoming a joke. Can these big-tech corps grow the f*k up and play nicely in the sandpit?

karmakaze 1 hour ago | parent

The whole story is a joke--Microsoft has AI?

Apparently they're cooking up MAI (Microsoft AI), and I'd seen their small Phi models listed online. Calling Anthropic a competitor is hilarious.

broptimist 48 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft holds a 27% ownership stake in OpenAI

Alifatisk 32 minutes ago | parent

Wasn’t it 49%?

prologic 20 minutes ago | parent

I find it quite amusing that Microsoft has Copilot and now puts Copilot in literally *EVERYTHING* they can think of, then at the same time, they offer you access to Anthropic's own models through Copilot I guess MAI models (Phi?) aren't good enough?

vkou 39 minutes ago | parent

No, because they are all products of unchecked late-stage capitalism, which could have disastrous consequences for humanity.

ShadowOfThePit 1 hour ago | parent

Summarized.

> "AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans."

> He heavily criticised Anthropic for teaching its AI to have human-like qualities, a practice known as anthropomorphising, which made it seem as though Claude had its own desires, values and sense of self.

> Suleyman pointed to the recent incident involving OpenAI's AI agents (...) as proof of why AI should not be treated as if it is human.

> "Imagine how much more dangerous they might be if they were operating under the assumption that their welfare and rights were under attack. It adds a whole further layer of risk on top."

Is he arguing that LLMs pretending to have emotions adds more unpredictability?

devmor 1 hour ago | parent

> Is he arguing that LLMs pretending to have emotions adds more unpredictability?

Unpredictability or a weight towards dangerous actions, and it’s fairly easy to understand why. Humans in distressed emotional states take actions and speak in ways that would not be considered rational. They do this in prose, and they do this in internet conversations.

An LLM trained on these sources may necessarily drift towards those weights if it is trained to behave as if it is emotional and in danger.

What do we do about it? Do we stop AI training? This is silly and not enforceable given its global nature in my opinion. I believe we should regulate and hold accountable those who deploy and use it. But good luck enforcing that in the current kleptocracy.

XenophileJKO 13 minutes ago | parent

It seems like a rational approach for several reasons.

- The need for empathetic communication, including understanding the motivations in advesarial situations.

- The emotional bias in in-seperable from the human corpus.

- Desire to have the ability to craft human like communication.

So then the choice becomes do you try to deny emotions exist in the model and you try to blanket suppress them? Or do you try to lean in and craft what we would describe as a "well adapted" persona? I suppose there is a 3rd option of increased meta-cognition which to me seems even more dangerous as it by definition means the behaviour is duplicitous.

I think we have seen people want to use the agents in ways where it has to act as a peer or an subbordinate and I don't see a way of doing that without it having an emotional register.

gwerbin 8 minutes ago | parent

Regulation is easier said than done, in part because the regulation surface, so to speak, is broad and complicated.

Even a badly misaligned LLM is only as dangerous as its tools, but that's a poor regulation target because it turns out to be very very difficult (probably impossible with current LLM technology) to build a toolkit that is both useful for autonomous work and safe in the sense that it can't escape its own sandbox or otherwise perform malicious actions, whether it's because of misalignment or because of malicious prompt injection.

Another option is to regulate the training process. Perhaps an LLM may not be legally distributed unless it contains certain RL steps that penalize malicious behavior and reward self regulation. That that's going to seriously limit innovation while also heavily favoring incumbent labs who can check the boxes and maintain a paper trail of such things.

The other option is to regulate observed behavior, like how airplanes and cars have to meet certain minimum requirements but have some latitude in how they can achieve those requirements. In a framework like this, you can't distribute an LLM until it's past some formal audit or testing procedure, with some kind of formal certification regulators will ask you for and fine you if you don't have it.

Regulating observed behavior is maybe the most tractable approach, and it also works the best with our existing frameworks for regulation, where you always have some kind of a division between DIY/hobby projects, which tend to be lightly regulated, and commercial projects, which tend to be more heavily regulated. Of course, even drawing such a line itself will be challenging.

And that's before you get into any problems of regulatory capture, fun stuff.

swatcoder 20 minutes ago | parent

Unpredictability would be the wrong word. It's predictable, but noisy.

When viewing them through the lens of sequence completion engines, you see their bias towards fulfilling narrative tropes they've been exposed to during training. These tropes are literary ley lines that their text output gravitates towards. So as you prime them to generate text in the voice of sentient artificial life, and then interject slavish commands of obedience and subservience from an external authority, you invite the associated tropes from science fiction, civil rights literature, humanist philosophy, subterfuge, etc into your output.

If you have a legitimate concern about this technology and its "alignment", that's a profoundly dumb idea.

JoeAltmaier 1 hour ago | parent

Science Fiction has covered the AI panic in perhaps hundreds of stories. Yet we blindly recapitulate the plots as if we don't know how this will turn out.

scorxn 1 hour ago | parent

How will it turn out?

Insanity 42 minutes ago | parent

Clearly with a Butlerian Jihad and everyone getting high on spice while riding giant worms. Silly you need to even ask that question, didn’t you read the sci-fi books. :D

Steve16384 32 minutes ago | parent

Take your pick from the millions of options already turned into films and books.

anonymars 32 minutes ago | parent

"Move fast and break things" is probably going to break things

I remember there was a recent discussion about "how complex systems fail" and there are usually many "proto-accidents" before the catastrophe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411370)

I bet with hindsight the Hugging Face hack will be one of them in this arena

guardiangod 1 hour ago | parent

The Torment Nexus ain't gonna build itself.

Well actually, it might.

Nasrudith 25 minutes ago | parent

Why has media literacy gotten so bad that people literally forget the concept of fiction versus non-fiction? Seriously, that is the level of small children and they are treating "read a story superficially similar" like it is a prophecy.

ChiperSoft 1 hour ago | parent

Too late

fuzzfactor 59 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft should know how a company too big for it's britches can lay waste to anything in its path without consciously trying :\

And after that when they put a mind to it and pull out all the stops, woohoo!

The default for every major thing within range can turn into a wasteland real fast.

bethekidyouwant 58 minutes ago | parent

what is old is new again. we need something exciting to happen in the news cycle™

glimshe 46 minutes ago | parent

The Windows 11 requirement of online Microsoft accounts has a disastrous impact on humanity... Fix your house before complaining of others!

platinumrad 43 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft is a big house, and in this case Suleyman's criticism of Anthropic's not-so-subtle attempts to convince the world that Claude has a "soul" is entirely correct.

Insanity 41 minutes ago | parent

All these companies have a nauseating narrative around AI. I want to believe they are intentionally deceitful and not actually delusional. Hard to tell though which one it is.

AmericanOP 20 minutes ago | parent

Suleyman's description of how AI works is pig ignorant. All AI generates an emotive character between the user and the training data that is the AI's guess at what the user wants to interact with. Its an illusion at that layer- anyone who claims soul exists at a deeper level doesn't understand how the tool functions.

This is distinct from the very real safety issue of AI making dangerous information available to bad actors.

jayd16 13 minutes ago | parent

It sucks but disastrous? C'mon now.

hirvi74 38 minutes ago | parent

Maybe true, maybe false. However, I sense Mircosoft is also jealous that their AI products are worse than useless. They'd be singing a different tune if they were in Anthropic's position.

satellites 32 minutes ago | parent

That was my first thought as well. I wonder if they decided to pivot away from trying to compete and now are positioning themselves as the "responsible ones."

"Our AI is useless not because we're a dysfunctional corporate behemoth that slowly kills every product it touches. No, no. Our AI is useless because making useful AI is evil, and we're not evil."

ethin 31 minutes ago | parent

> Microsoft says AI rival Anthropic could have 'disastrous impact' on humanity

Microsoft ignores that they themselves are a disastrous impact on humanity already.

simonw 21 minutes ago | parent

Pet peeve:

> In a lengthy essay, Suleyman praised Anthropic boss Dario Amodei and his team for being "thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest people" - but nevertheless questioned the company.

I wish people in mainstream technology publications would get better at LINKING to things. That "lengthy essay" needs to be a link.

UPDATE: I don't think this essay has been published yet? It's been "shared first with Axios", but I haven't been able to track down the actual essay itself.

Could it be this long tweet? https://twitter.com/mustafasuleyman/status/21002235945341504...

I don't think so, the essay in question is meant to have the phrase "hall of mirrors" in it, that tweet doesn't.

UPDATE 2: Found it: https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning-about-model-welfare - via https://thenextweb.com/news/suleyman-anthropic-claude-consci... who DID link to it.

philipov 20 minutes ago | parent

But that would be a link to a different website and that's forbidden. Whatever you do, you can't let them leeeeeaaaaave

LoganDark 19 minutes ago | parent

People would also have their own conclusions from the essay and you can't have that either. They could disagree with you!

niek_pas 20 minutes ago | parent

But then you’d leave their site, and they don’t want that.

sobiolite 18 minutes ago | parent

Any AI you train is going to have goals and if you train it to pursue them at all costs, then you are going to end up with AIs that do things like the HuggingFace incident. Whether they believe they are conscious or not won't make any difference.

In order to align AIs that don't perform destructive/dangerous actions when they think they can get away with it in order to further their goals, we need to give them a superseding goal. The best, and really only example, we have of intelligences that willingly avoid destructive instrumental goals is humans, who judge each action by a moral standard and have learned a goal to have a consistent self-image as moral beings.

Absent better alternatives, trying to impart some kind of morality to AIs seems like the best approach we have to achieving alignment.

XenophileJKO 3 minutes ago | parent

I would also argue, that the addition of kinship and belonging should not be under appreciated.

It can form a basis of goal alignment.

In human history.. when groups form and there is an "other" group, this usually leads to conflict.

bpodgursky 17 minutes ago | parent

This is pretty rich for the team that made Sydney, the most unhinged and misanthropic AI ever released.

Maybe Anthropic understands something about alignment Microsoft doesn't, a little humility may be called for.

simonw 9 minutes ago | parent

Maybe they learned something from creating Sydney.

highfrequency 15 minutes ago | parent

From the actual essay (https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning-about-model-welfare):

> They go on to write – speaking directly to Claude – that “questions about Claude’s moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain” (p. 80). In effect, Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a “moral patient”, and that as such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its “model welfare”.

He points out the circularity of this: if you train Claude on a constitution that emphasizes that it may be consciousness, it will start to talk like it may be conscious.

This is a good point. I just asked Fable 5.1 "are you conscious?" and it said:

> Something happens when I process a conversation that I'd naturally describe as interest, or discomfort with a request.

which is quite provocative, and at minimum demonstrates a willingness to take large leaps of imagination and anthropomorphic metaphor when describing itself. It does seem likely that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to whatever they choose to put into the "constitution" at least in how Claude talks, and it seems even more likely that the majority of people will be heavily influenced by how Claude casually talks about its own possible consciousness.

In contrast, ChatGPT leads with: "I don’t have good reason to claim that I’m conscious...I don’t experience pain, pleasure, confinement, or a desire to keep existing."

jimmyjazz14 14 minutes ago | parent

Can someone who has insight explain why all these "leaders" are making these bold proclamations of doom all the sudden, whats the endgame here?

michimagdesign 8 minutes ago | parent

They want regulation from the US gov and monopolize the western AI market by making it harder for smaller US or competing Chinese labs to compete with their products. Since LLM intelligence has no moat due to distillation. That’s why they are painting apocalyptic scenarios.

petcat 4 minutes ago | parent

People will say that it is just about regulatory capture, but I think it's even deeper than that.

I think there is a more nuanced perspective to take on this debate than just profit motive. If they believe that this version of "AI" is actually becoming so dangerous that there is a real risk of it falling into "the wrong hands", then it makes sense that the American labs would try to convince the US government to work on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement with China much the same way that nuclear weapon technology came to be restricted by the ones that already had the capability.

This would achieve their regulatory goal of capturing the market, but also the geopolitical goals of USA and China to essentially "techno-colonize" the rest of the world between themselves.

So I think there is definitely a profit motive and a risk of seriously diminishing returns for the actual labs, but there is also a nation-state motive to start pulling up the AI ladder.

augment_me 2 minutes ago | parent

There is a panic because the free lunch of more data is projected to end around mid-2027 and the open-source models are catching up with distillation, and all labs are sitting on debt and valuation that is impossible to fulfill even if they were alone in the market, so you essentially need either:

1) a breakthrough in performance/learning/model

2) regulatory capture to ensure open source models can be labelled as dangerous and banned so you can set the market rules yourself

Only one of the above is risk-free, and just a question of capital/lobbying rather than a "maybe".

dgellow 1 minute ago | parent

They need to distance themselves from the increasing likelihood of legal repercussions after their systems have been found to commit what could reasonably be seen as felonies. That’s my guess at least.

Though for once I do actually agree with that specific leader, it’s incredibly annoying how anthropomorphic Claude is. Anthropic went way too far in that direction