There's been a lot of discussion among safety-concerned people about whether it was bad for Anthropic to release Claude-3. I felt like I didn’t have a great picture of all the considerations here, and I felt that people were conflating many different types of arguments for why it might be bad. So I decided to try to write down an at-least-slightly-self-contained description of my overall views and reasoning here.

Tabooing “Race Dynamics”

I’ve heard a lot of people say that this “is bad for race dynamics”. I think that this conflates a couple of different mechanisms by which releasing Claude-3 might have been bad.

So, taboo-ing “race dynamics”, a common narrative behind these words is

As companies release better & better models, this incentivizes other companies to pursue more capable models at the expense of safety. Eventually, one company goes too far, produces unaligned AGI, and we all die”.

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Outline:

(00:28) Tabooing “Race Dynamics”

(01:28) Did releasing Claude-3 cause other AI labs to invest less in evals/redteaming models before deployment?

(02:43) Did releasing Claude-3 divert resources away from alignment research and into capabilities research?

(03:48) Releasing Very SOTA Models

(04:18) Anthropic at the Frontier is Good?

(06:18) What I Currently Think

(06:59) Conclusion

(08:34) Appendix:

(08:38) Capabilities Leakage

(12:37) Is Increasing Capabilities Bad?

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.