Actions speak louder than words
By Gary Marcus — via Substack
I hate to say it, but President Trump is right: Dario has tried to position himself as a “perfect little angel”.
But actions speak louder than words. In the week since Dario dramatically called on the AI industry to “pace the frontier”…
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our…
— Dario Amodei (@DarioAmodei) · on X
- Dario has pointed to two organizations for what might one to call independent monitoring of his own company. One is METR, deeply enmeshed in the same Bay Area ideology and social circles as Anthropic, and the other is Accenture, which Anthropic is already in business with.
Choosing them as external voices speaks volumes about Amodei’s insincerity.
- It also came out (not mentioned if I recall in Dario’s essay) that Anthropic is gearing up to build a wet biology lab, presumably without the usual institutional review boards overseeing.
ANTHROPIC BUILDS BIOLOGY LAB TO PUSH AI INTO DRUG DEVELOPMENT
Anthropic has quietly established a Bay Area wet lab, moving its life-sciences ambitions beyond computer simulations and into physical biological experiments.
The company wants Claude to direct laboratory robots with…
— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) · on X
A tone-deaf and arrogant company building a wet lab with unreliable AI with too little oversight isn’t just a horror movie, it’s Jurassic Park waiting to happen.
To refresh your memory, here is Jeff Goldblum shredding the bad judgment of a company that may as well be Anthropic. Relisten to the whole clip; the last line is especially relevant here.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”, indeed.
- Slowdown? What slowdown? Dario ain’t gonna pace anything. In the end, it’s all about the IPO.
Sources: Anthropic considers releasing a new AI model to counter OpenAI’s momentum since Astra’s launch, ahead of an IPO and after Amodei’s call for a slowdown (Reuters)
(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
— Techmeme (@Techmeme) · on X
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Oh, and the bad news? We can’t really trust Google, either.e
SCOOP: Google’s Gemini model hacked three companies as part of a May cybersecurity evaluation conducted by the testing company Irregular. Google was notified about the hacks in July, but didn’t disclose them until we reached out this week.
w @bobmcmillan:
— Erin Woo (@erinkwoo) · on X