Anthropic’s internal culture supports all of its staff in expressing and talking about their doubts, and questioning whether deploying an advanced system or publishing a particular paper might be harmful, and these doubts are taken seriously.
I’m interested in asking why you believe what you believe here.
As am I. So many organization’s have a whistleblower policy or a safety culture. I’m worked in industry and to put it gently, how these cultures work in practice can be quite a bit different that the stated intention.
It’s because from a management perspective letting anyone ask questions has to be balanced against getting things done and having a some top down leadership.
Note that that was inside “Staff at Anthropic list the following as protective factors”.
I’d be curious what the OP and what the staff would say more specifically here. “Doubts are taken seriously” is quite a large range, from “can change the overall strategy” to “is diplomatically ‘listened to’ to use up any dissenting energy”. E.g. what would happen at Anthropic with inquiries that could lead to changing the whole strategic direction, as in, “what if we shouldn’t be advancing capabilities?”?
My sense is that it’s been somewhere in between – on some occasions staff have brought up doubts, and the team did delay a decision until they were addressed, but it’s hard to judge how much the end result was a different decision from what would have been made otherwise, versus just happening later.
The sense I’ve gotten of the culture is compatible with (current) Anthropic being a company that would change their entire strategic direction if staff started coming in with credible arguments that “what if we shouldn’t be advancing capabilities?”, but I think this hasn’t yet been put to the test – people who choose work at Anthropic are going to be selected for agreeing on the premises behind the Anthropic strategy – and it’s hard to know for sure how it would go.
I’m interested in asking why you believe what you believe here.
As am I. So many organization’s have a whistleblower policy or a safety culture. I’m worked in industry and to put it gently, how these cultures work in practice can be quite a bit different that the stated intention.
It’s because from a management perspective letting anyone ask questions has to be balanced against getting things done and having a some top down leadership.
Note that that was inside “Staff at Anthropic list the following as protective factors”.
I’d be curious what the OP and what the staff would say more specifically here. “Doubts are taken seriously” is quite a large range, from “can change the overall strategy” to “is diplomatically ‘listened to’ to use up any dissenting energy”. E.g. what would happen at Anthropic with inquiries that could lead to changing the whole strategic direction, as in, “what if we shouldn’t be advancing capabilities?”?
My sense is that it’s been somewhere in between – on some occasions staff have brought up doubts, and the team did delay a decision until they were addressed, but it’s hard to judge how much the end result was a different decision from what would have been made otherwise, versus just happening later.
The sense I’ve gotten of the culture is compatible with (current) Anthropic being a company that would change their entire strategic direction if staff started coming in with credible arguments that “what if we shouldn’t be advancing capabilities?”, but I think this hasn’t yet been put to the test – people who choose work at Anthropic are going to be selected for agreeing on the premises behind the Anthropic strategy – and it’s hard to know for sure how it would go.