Right now it seems like the entire community is jumping to conclusions based on a couple of “impressions” people got from talking to Dario, plus an offhand line in a blog post.
No, many people had the impression that Anthropic had made such a commitment, which is why they were so surprised when they saw the Claude 3 benchmarks/marketing. Their impressions were derived from a variety of sources; those are merely the few bits of “hard evidence”, gathered after the fact, of anything that could be thought of as an “organizational commitment”.
Also, if Dustin Moskovitz and Gwern—two dispositionally pretty different people—both came away from talking to Dario with this understanding, I do not think that is something you just wave off. Failures of communication do happen. It’s pretty strange for this many people to pick up the same misunderstanding over the course of several years, from many different people (including Dario, but also others), in a way that’s beneficial to Anthropic, and then middle management starts telling you that maybe there was a vibe but they’ve never heard of any such commitment (nevermind what Dustin and Gwern heard, or anyone else who might’ve heard similar from other Anthropic employees).
I do think it would be nice if Anthropic did make such a statement, but seeing how adversarially everyone has treated the information they do release, I don’t blame them for not doing so.
I really think this is assuming the conclusion. I would be… maybe not happy, but definitely much less unhappy, with a response like, “Dang, we definitely did not intend to communicate a binding commitment to not release frontier models that are better than anything else publicly available at the time. In the future, you should not assume that any verbal communication from any employee, including the CEO, is ever a binding commitment that Anthropic, as an organzation, will respect, even if they say the words This is a binding commitment. It needs to be in writing on our website, etc, etc.”
No, many people had the impression that Anthropic had made such a commitment, which is why they were so surprised when they saw the Claude 3 benchmarks/marketing. Their impressions were derived from a variety of sources; those are merely the few bits of “hard evidence”, gathered after the fact, of anything that could be thought of as an “organizational commitment”.
Also, if Dustin Moskovitz and Gwern—two dispositionally pretty different people—both came away from talking to Dario with this understanding, I do not think that is something you just wave off. Failures of communication do happen. It’s pretty strange for this many people to pick up the same misunderstanding over the course of several years, from many different people (including Dario, but also others), in a way that’s beneficial to Anthropic, and then middle management starts telling you that maybe there was a vibe but they’ve never heard of any such commitment (nevermind what Dustin and Gwern heard, or anyone else who might’ve heard similar from other Anthropic employees).
I really think this is assuming the conclusion. I would be… maybe not happy, but definitely much less unhappy, with a response like, “Dang, we definitely did not intend to communicate a binding commitment to not release frontier models that are better than anything else publicly available at the time. In the future, you should not assume that any verbal communication from any employee, including the CEO, is ever a binding commitment that Anthropic, as an organzation, will respect, even if they say the words
This is a binding commitment. It needs to be in writing on our website, etc, etc.”