alt Hacker NewsWe know how this story will end for Dario. See Oppenheimer, Turing, Lavoisier, Galileo, Socretes etc. Power does not reside in the hands of people with knowledge or even wealth. And most technical people have not taken a political philosophy course or even a philosphy course. The Ring of Gyges story is 4000 years old.
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Oppenheimer? Really? Quoting a review of an Oppenheimer biography:
“Oppenheimer was clearly an enormously charming man, but also a manipulative man and one who made enemies he need not have made. The really horrible things Oppenheimer did as a young man – placing a poisoned apple on the desk of his advisor at Cambridge, attempting to strangle his best friend – and yes, he really did those things – Monk passes off as the result of temporary insanity, a profound but passing psychological disturbance. (There’s no real attempt by Monk to explain Oppenheimer’s attempt to get Linus Pauling’s wife Ava to run off to Mexico with him, which ended the possibility of collaboration with one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth, or any, century.) Certainly the youthful Oppenheimer did go through a period of serious mental illness; but the desire to get his own way, and feelings of enormous frustration with people who prevented him from getting his own way, seem to have been part of his character throughout his life.”
Seems more like Sam Altman, who is known to get his way, than Dario.
I do not believe the Ring of Gyges preceded Plato making it up for The Republic... Where are you getting 4000 years?
Also maybe not seeing the message or connection here... That myth isn't really about who has power or not, right? It's kind of just a trite little "why you should do good even when no one is watching" thing. It just serves Socrates for his argument with Thrasymachus, and leads us into book 2 where it really gets going with Glaucon and all that. This is from memory so I might be a little off.
I think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn:
1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.
That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:
2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.
What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.