Claude 3 Opus meaningfully advanced the frontier? Or slightly advanced it but Anthropic markets it like it was a substantial advance so they’re being similarly low-integrity?
I updated somewhat over the following weeks that Opus had meaningfully advanced the frontier, but I don’t know how much that is true for other people.
It seems like Anthropic’s marketing is in direct contradiction with the explicit commitment they made to many people, including Dustin, which seems to have quite consistently been the “meaningfully advance the frontier” line. I think it’s less clear whether their actual capabilities are, as opposed to their marketing statements. I think if you want to have any chance of enforcing commitments like this, the enforcement needs to happen at the latest when the organization publicly claims to have done something in direct contradiction to it, so I think the marketing statements matter a bunch here.
Anthropic has also continued to publish ads claiming that Claude 3 has meaningfully pushed the state of the art and is the smartest model on the market since the discussion around this happened, so it’s not just a one-time oversight by their marketing department.
Separately, multiple Anthropic staffers seem to think themselves no longer bound by their previous commitment and expect that Anthropic will likely unambiguously advance the frontier if they get the chance.
I guess I’m more willing to treat Anthropic’s marketing as not-representing-Anthropic. Shrug. [Edit: like, maybe it’s consistent-with-being-a-good-guy-and-basically-honest to exaggerate your product in a similar way to everyone else. (You risk the downsides of creating hype but that’s a different issue than the integrity thing.)]
It is disappointing that Anthropic hasn’t clarified its commitments after the post-launch confusion, one way or the other.
I guess I’m more willing to treat Anthropic’s marketing as not-representing-Anthropic. Shrug.
I feel sympathetic to this, but when I think of the mess of trying to hold an organization accountable when I literally can’t take the public statements of the organization itself as evidence, then that feels kind of doomed to me. It feels like it would allow Anthropic to weasel itself out of almost any commitment.
I guess I’m more willing to treat Anthropic’s marketing as not-representing-Anthropic.
Like, when OpenAI marketing says GPT-4 is our most aligned model yet! you could say this shows that OpenAI deeply misunderstands alignment but I tend to ignore it. Even mostly when Sam Altman says it himself.
[Edit after habryka’s reply: my weak independent impression is that often the marketing people say stuff that the leadership and most technical staff disagree with, and if you use marketing-speak to substantially predict what-leadership-and-staff-believe you’ll make worse predictions.]
Oh, I have indeed used this to update that OpenAI deeply misunderstands alignment, and this IMO has allowed me to make many accurate predictions about what OpenAI has been doing over the last few years, so I feel good about interpreting it that way.
I updated somewhat over the following weeks that Opus had meaningfully advanced the frontier, but I don’t know how much that is true for other people.
It seems like Anthropic’s marketing is in direct contradiction with the explicit commitment they made to many people, including Dustin, which seems to have quite consistently been the “meaningfully advance the frontier” line. I think it’s less clear whether their actual capabilities are, as opposed to their marketing statements. I think if you want to have any chance of enforcing commitments like this, the enforcement needs to happen at the latest when the organization publicly claims to have done something in direct contradiction to it, so I think the marketing statements matter a bunch here.
Anthropic has also continued to publish ads claiming that Claude 3 has meaningfully pushed the state of the art and is the smartest model on the market since the discussion around this happened, so it’s not just a one-time oversight by their marketing department.
Separately, multiple Anthropic staffers seem to think themselves no longer bound by their previous commitment and expect that Anthropic will likely unambiguously advance the frontier if they get the chance.
Thanks.
I guess I’m more willing to treat Anthropic’s marketing as not-representing-Anthropic. Shrug. [Edit: like, maybe it’s consistent-with-being-a-good-guy-and-basically-honest to exaggerate your product in a similar way to everyone else. (You risk the downsides of creating hype but that’s a different issue than the integrity thing.)]
It is disappointing that Anthropic hasn’t clarified its commitments after the post-launch confusion, one way or the other.
I feel sympathetic to this, but when I think of the mess of trying to hold an organization accountable when I literally can’t take the public statements of the organization itself as evidence, then that feels kind of doomed to me. It feels like it would allow Anthropic to weasel itself out of almost any commitment.
Like, when OpenAI marketing says GPT-4 is our most aligned model yet! you could say this shows that OpenAI deeply misunderstands alignment but I tend to ignore it. Even mostly when Sam Altman says it himself.
[Edit after habryka’s reply: my weak independent impression is that often the marketing people say stuff that the leadership and most technical staff disagree with, and if you use marketing-speak to substantially predict what-leadership-and-staff-believe you’ll make worse predictions.]
Oh, I have indeed used this to update that OpenAI deeply misunderstands alignment, and this IMO has allowed me to make many accurate predictions about what OpenAI has been doing over the last few years, so I feel good about interpreting it that way.