alt Hacker News> Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, was once the VP of research at OpenAI, and reportedly split with the firm after a disagreement over OpenAI’s roadmap — namely its growing commercial focus.
So he's now the CEO of Anthropic, a company selling AI services?
Claude is amazing, and we use it's Teams plan here at the office extensively (having switched from ChatGPT since Claude is vastly better at technical material and adcopy writing).
But, Anthropic definitely has a commercial motive... no?
I'm not saying a commercial motive is a bad thing - hardly... but this quote seems to be odd given the circumstances.
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You're absolutely correct that they're a for-profit firm, but you're missing that they were founded specifically over safety concerns. Basically it's not just "commercial motive" in general, it's the sense that OpenAI was only paying lipservice to safety work as a marketing move.
For example, here's their research mission: https://www.anthropic.com/research
And an example of one of their early research focuses, Constitutional AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073
I don't think it's odd.
* Acting in accordance with declared motivations is a demonstration of integrity.
* Acting towards hidden motivations that oppose your declared motivations is deceptive action.
Honest people don't want to lead and be responsible for deceptive action, even if the action is desirable.
For these types of people, it is often better to leave a place that requires them to active deceptively in favor of one that will let them operate with integrity.
Even if the end goal is the same, eg: to make money.
At least Anthropic is honest about their intentions though. That would be enough for me to leave OpenAI. Hey you want to commercialize it sure but don’t hide behind lies.
> I'm not saying a commercial motive is a bad thing - hardly... but this quote seems to be odd given the circumstances.
It only seems odd to you because you are reading much more into it than he's ever said, like "AI should never be commercialized under any circumstances and it is impossible to do so correctly". Then yes, it would be hypocritical. But he didn't say that and never has; and Anthropic thinks they are doing it right.
I think the whole situation where they got some serious investment from SBF and then he got indicted pushed them into commercialising their tech so they could have more standard sources of funding
As I understand the main disagreement between OpenAI and Anthropic is exactly how much and what is censored.
Can you go into more depth why you believe Claude is better @ creating adcopy
Pivoting from "for all mankind" to "all for myself" would make me deeply uncomfortable, too. The change from one position to the other, not either position in any absolute sense, is the concerning part.