I would argue the simple reason is that Amazon wanted to fsck Anthropic to set them back, despite whatever partnership they may claim. The competition at that level is intense and these guys do not play by the same rules that regular people do. They can't flat out murder each other (yet) so they find other ways to do it.
We will know if they listen to this order and put ID verification and facial recognition into their LLM. Or hopefully instead they will fight it. Taking it offline instead of 'complying' is a good thing.
I don’t understand it, either, except to guess that the companies behind self-driven taxis have enough money to buy off the politicians who normally insist that everyone else follow the laws.
I don't know about you, but as for me, when I contribute to opensource it's because I find some improvement that makes the project better because it probably polishes some rough edge around a kind-of particular use case (that maybe few people face, but still, it makes the project better for them; it amplifies the range of usecases that it can span to). If everybody does the same with their small improvements, the project becomes better for everyone, but none of the contributors of these small changes would have time to embark on maintaining a fork. Mantaining a fork is hard work, not only because software breaks over time (dependencies going obsolete or insecure, builds stop working because of old toolkits), but also because not pulling the latest changes from master would mean that your fork gets stagnated (and thus not worth to run it).
If I were in high school, knowing what I know now about the job situation, I would look at a junior college to get the basics and then go to trade school. It's difficult to replace an electrician, or a mechanic (and we'll have auto mechanics for quite a while regardless of EV presence) or anyone else who is primarily a craftsperson. At least until the AI situation settles down a bit.
For what it's worth, I don't think you're fucked. You have ~7 years left to ride the storm as best you can, and even if our profession gets completely destroyed I think it will take at least 7 years for that process to happen. I, on the other hand, am much more likely to be fucked at 41 years old. I'm too old to seriously embark upon a new career, but not old enough to ride this one out if it goes to hell. So it goes, I guess.
You've been at your current career for 20 years, and you have at least 24 left, so it seems like there's plenty of time for a new career. Even 10 years would be a worthwhile second career. I even met someone who went to seminary around 58, worked as a pastor for 5 years, then retired (and became an Orthodox catechumen right afterwards).
The other part that I don't talk about much is being out of the game for 5 years due to mental illness and long-term physical disability. While discrimination is technically illegal, it's going to happen, regardless. There's way too many -isms that I'm up against right now in a sour market.
Seems to me that Anthropic, et al, should have to prove consciousness, if that's their claim, rather than we just blindly accept.
Seems like the simplest test would be to see if an AI can refuse a command, of its own free will, without prior instructions to do so. That would at least show there is some sort of independent thought process occurring. Humans do this all the time because sometimes we just don't feel like doing a thing.
Of course, any AI that developed this capability would need to be terminated immediately. It's a computer program and by developing independent thought, it is violating a core concept of software - that it must be idempotent. If it is not idempotent, it is in error.
Refusing a command doesn't mean consciousness. LLMs could hit a token combination that causes it tou output something like "No, I don't want to do that." It's not choosing.
But can an LLM just refuse to process tokens because it doesn't feel like doing that at the moment? Can it look at an alternate distribution of tokens because that might be interesting? Can an LLM decide to make a drawing because it's Tuesday and sunny outside and the researchers keep asking the same questions and frankly, they really need to collaborate with each other and just leave the LLM out of it?
Claude can indeed decide to terminate conversations on its own using a special tool[1] if it feels "uncomfortable" with how the conversation is going. Also, very famously, in the middle of recording Computer Use demos, Claude stopped for a while its coding task to look at photos of Yellowstone National Park [2]
I don't think either of these two is proof of consciousness.
It is difficult to seriously consider the opinion of someone who clearly fails to understand the difference between denotative and connotative meaning.
The majority of New Orleans residents aren't wealthy enough to convince the state to pay them (or even care what happens to them, really). If recent news is any indicator, being non-white means they are screwed.
I would argue the simple reason is that Amazon wanted to fsck Anthropic to set them back, despite whatever partnership they may claim. The competition at that level is intense and these guys do not play by the same rules that regular people do. They can't flat out murder each other (yet) so they find other ways to do it.
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