Well, if Dustin sees no problem in talking about it, and it’s become a major policy concern, then I guess I should disclose that I spent a while talking with Dario back in late October 2022 (ie. pre-RSP in Sept 2023), and we discussed Anthropic’s scaling policy at some length, and I too came away with the same impression everyone else seems to have: that Anthropic’s AI-arms-race policy was to invest heavily in scaling, creating models at or pushing the frontier to do safety research on, but that they would only release access to second-best models & would not ratchet capabilities up, and it would wait for someone else to do so before catching up. So it would not contribute to races but not fall behind and become irrelevant/noncompetitive.
And Anthropic’s release of Claude-1 and Claude-2 always seemed to match that policy—even if Claude-2 had a larger context window for a long time than any other decent available model, Claude-2 was still substantially weaker than ChatGPT-4. (Recall that the causus belli for Sam Altman trying to fire Helen Toner from the OA board was a passing reference in a co-authored paper to Anthropic not pushing the frontier like OA did.)
What I’m concluding from the discussion so far is that I should have read the Anthropic RSP more carefully than I did.
Anthropic is in little need of ideas from me, but yeah, I’ll probably pause such things for a while. I’m not saying the RSP is bad, but I’d like to see how things work out.
Well, if Dustin sees no problem in talking about it, and it’s become a major policy concern, then I guess I should disclose that I spent a while talking with Dario back in late October 2022 (ie. pre-RSP in Sept 2023), and we discussed Anthropic’s scaling policy at some length, and I too came away with the same impression everyone else seems to have: that Anthropic’s AI-arms-race policy was to invest heavily in scaling, creating models at or pushing the frontier to do safety research on, but that they would only release access to second-best models & would not ratchet capabilities up, and it would wait for someone else to do so before catching up. So it would not contribute to races but not fall behind and become irrelevant/noncompetitive.
And Anthropic’s release of Claude-1 and Claude-2 always seemed to match that policy—even if Claude-2 had a larger context window for a long time than any other decent available model, Claude-2 was still substantially weaker than ChatGPT-4. (Recall that the causus belli for Sam Altman trying to fire Helen Toner from the OA board was a passing reference in a co-authored paper to Anthropic not pushing the frontier like OA did.)
What I’m concluding from the discussion so far is that I should have read the Anthropic RSP more carefully than I did.
I hear you sometimes share dual-use (or plain capabilities?) ideas with Anthropic. If that’s true, does this change your policy?
Anthropic is in little need of ideas from me, but yeah, I’ll probably pause such things for a while. I’m not saying the RSP is bad, but I’d like to see how things work out.