One of the things I've been noticing are lawyers getting annoyed when they realized you spent time working a matter with an LLM. In the cases I've seen, it had nothing to do with the quality of what came out of the LLM. It seems to be related to --and this is only my perspective-- a reality where now reasonably intelligent/experienced clients are coming to them with a case fairly well digested, whereas before they would have to pay the law firm tens of thousands of dollars to ingest documentation and information and do the digestion.
In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients.
Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.
> I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold
Then he should not IPO, dissolve the company and go into politics to fight against human extinction.
I am certainly not buying a single Anthropic share. Why would you support them financially if they are telling you they are going to kill all of humanity?
My position on the clear gaslighting coming out of Anthropic is simple.
1: It is ridiculous on the face of it; it does not pass the physics test. They are actually claiming that AI will kill ALL OF HUMANITY (>10% probability) and have not provided a detailed explanation of exactly how they see that happening. Not one.
Publish a paper showing exactly how you kill eight billion people while we all sit around and do nothing watching the first 5, 10, 100, 500 million die on CNN. I mean, as smart as these people are to work on AI they seem to be some of the dumbest people on earth.
In addition to that, all proposals invariably assume we are complete idiots for decades and do nothing to install safety measures (which do not have to involve AI at all in lots of cases) to mitigate.
So, yeah, everyone: Stop working on all cybersecurity projects. Resistance is futile.
2: If everyone at Anthropic truly believes this doomsday vision, they should move to shut down the company immediately and go write software to get more clicks on Facebook or something.
3: Nobody should buy Anthropic's stock when they IPO. Not one person or institution. Why would you provide them with massive amounts of money if they are telling you that they are going to kill all of humanity? What? They are good and everyone else is evil? Please.
I remember when the Y2K zealots were convinced civilization would come to an end at the turn of the clock starting at the end of 1999. "Bat shit crazy" is the only way I can describe that era. I also remember when Al Gore said we would all be dead by now. Again, "Bat shit crazy" and likely with political and financial objectives driving it all.
It seems humanity is susceptible to these crazy cults that grab onto something and just don't let go. I have yet to see one such predictions come true, the proof being that I am writing this and you are reading it. These people are bat-shit-crazy and you should not listen to them or support them.
4: Don't work for them. You'd be killing humanity.
5: No company should use Anthropic's products. They are telling you they are building the human extinction machine. Don't help them succeed.
----------
Etc.
This is one of the things that really gets me about the ease with which the ignorant media outlets can reach billions of people with complete nonsense these days. And nobody asks even the simplest questions like: How do you actually kill eight billion people? Show your work. Or, why would we just bazooka power plants feeding AI data centers on day 5? Etc. It's FUD at its best. I am sure there are both political and financial reasons for supporting and promoting this nonsense. I won't even venture a guess as to what they might be.
And let's not forget about enemies of the West being thrilled to fund the FUD because, if we set the brakes on development, they will absolutely win. Then what?
----------
If you care to have a better understanding of what might be going on, watch this:
It’s the same thing with Covid. People thought 1 in 10 people would be dead. And believed it for years, despite it being orders and orders of magnitude wrong.
Humans love a good end-of-world story. Always did, always will. It’s when they want the world to conform to their ungrounded irrational bat-shit crazy nonsense that I get a worried. Especially when people in power actually take their nonsense seriously.
Anthropic needs to shut down. They are promoting insanity from every pore for some crazy reason.
The best message these people can get from the public is to have their IPO fail miserably. Nobody should buy one share.
Either they are crazy, in which case you should not give them your money.
Or, they are truly building a doomsday machine, in which case you should not give them your money.
Ergo: Don't buy their IPO.
I've been trying to steel-man the argument and find a way in which AI could kill all of humanity. Maybe I am too stupid to come up with a clever enough idea. You would have to assume that eight billion people are NPCs in the game of life and simply fall over without any thought, effort, action or desire for self preservation.
Last time I used the Windows version it pegged all my cores at 100% usage for some reason. The machine became unusable. Instead I used Codex with JetBrains Rider (doing a C# project) and it worked flawlessly.
Everything everyone is predicting has almost zero value. Nobody owns a crystal ball. Right now there could be someone working in a garage somewhere that could shake the entire LLM world to the core with a unique insight and innovation.
Think about the world before the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper.
Did anyone predict that paper, what preceded and followed it?
Nope.
Same case now.
Maybe the word "prediction" is the problem; "guessing" would be better.
OK, what the heck. I'll make a prediction too:
You better buy SpaceX stock now. The way things are going in the US, the only way we build AI data centers at scale will be in space. Politicians have turned data centers into punching bags to be used to gain votes. We can't build power plants and people are being led to believe all kinds of things. Regardless of which, if any, are true or not, the rate of construction of AI data centers in the US is and will be seriously constrained by realities on the ground.
Have you chatted with Ai about the economics of space vs terrestrial?
Even if you believe they can get cost to launch 1KG down to 100 bucks... (current falcon heavy is $1550) you still have the problem with all those solar panels.
1GW of space AI requires... 1 GW of solar to power it.
Current manufacturers of space solar is 1-2 MW &.. space solar aint cheap. $100 per watt. They estimate each spacex will be 250 kW. So.. $25M just for the solar for each satellite. Yeah you can use less efficient / cheaper solar, but then your weight goes up.
Also... Ground AI datacenters haven't nailed down how quickly GPUs depreciate. Accountants claim 6 years while CRWV says it's longer and most realists say it's shorter. It's based on how quickly GPUs will improve. Which is QUICKLY.
In space you'll have to depreciate GPU, all supporting hardware including the satellite, electronics, solar panels, and launch costs. On the ground it's just the GPU & you can even sell the old one down.
ground based AI needs power. $FRVO is an interesting ticker if you believe in their technology. Just announced a deal with google yesterday.
It isn't going to be easy, of course. Yet, I do believe they will make it work.
One correction: SpaceX makes their own solar arrays. The cost is nowhere near what you quoted. Source: I worked for SpaceX for a few years.
Also, you can generate a lot more power in space per unit area due to not having the limitations created by our atmosphere and weather. It's continuous generation at 30 to 40 percent higher per-unit-area radiation. Generation on earth is roughly an inverted parabola (on a good day without clouds and weather) that, at best, if you integrate the area under the power curve, delivers 66% of the total equivalent energy say, a nuclear reactor, could deliver during the same period. So, once you increase radiation from about 1,000 W/m2 (impossible to achieve on earth due to weather and other realities) to 1,400 W/m2, 24/7, no weather, etc. The scenario quickly becomes vastly different.
Geothermal is very interesting, thanks for the ticker, I'll look into it.
All that said, I think the US (and Europe, if they care to survive) needs to have, as a top national priority, a massive program for the construction of nuclear power plants.
A few years ago, I ran through an analysis of power generation needs to convert our entire fleet of vehicles to electric power. That required at least doubling our power generation capacity. This was the equivalent of having to build 1,200 nuclear power plants, each producing 1 GW 24/7.
This is impossible to achieve with solar, or wind, or the combination.
So, even if we decide not to care one bit about AI data centers, we need to double our power generation capacity (and infrastructure to deliver it).
Add AI data centers to that equation and the number could easily climb another 600 nuclear power plants.
Here's the problem that a naïve conversation with an LLM will not uncover: Humanity and Politics.
Could we embark on such a massive energy-generation project? Yes, absolutely.
Is it realistic? Nope. Not even close.
In other words, we can do it but it is impossible...which sounds like an oxymoron until you consider that we have lots of examples of projects that are absolutely plausible that, once they contact political and government reality, quickly become impossible. The best-worst example I always grab is the California high speed train disaster.
No, not really. I know what you are trying to say, and I fully agree. We need to stop using "democracy" or "democratizing".
Democracy, in it's purest form, is about mob rule --majority rule, if you want to say it in a softer/kinder way. "Democratizing" means giving a mob control of the thing, it does not mean making it accessible to all at all.
Democracy is not about mob rule, it's about a dialog. Sure, sometimes it becomes heated argumentation and noise, but it's not so much about "ruling". Lincoln in his union address in 1860 said: "I so adopt it because it furnishes a precise and an agreed starting point for a discussion between Republicans and that wing of the Democracy headed by Senator Douglas."
"Democratization" in a sense is about making things accessible for discussions. "Dictatorship" is the opposing term - things get "dictated" by a single entity - person, political force or a corporation.
> Democracy is not about mob rule, it's about a dialog.
No my friend, Democracy is majority rule, which easily turns into a ruling mob. It has nothing whatsoever to do with dialog.
Also, your quote of Lincoln's address is taken completely out of context. He was talking about his opposition of the ideas of a faction of Democrats who were in favor of slavery and his support of the majority of Republicans who believed slavery was a moral, social, and political evil.
In other words, take the time to at least do some research before you try to use quotes in support of a failed conclusion.
Did you read the Greeks in school? Probably not. I recommend Plato's Republic. Both he and Socrates talked about the flaws of direct/pure democracy that would usually make it degenerate into mob rule.
In Republic Plato developed a hierarchy:
Aristocracy: Rule by the wise (my comment: a fantasy)
Timocracy: Rule by the honorable (my comment: another fantasy)
Oligarchy: Rule by the rich (my comment: a reality in many societies)
Democracy: Rule by the masses (my comment: glad we don't have this)
Tyranny: Rule by a despot (my comment: plenty of examples of this in history)
It took until the late 1700's for the idea of a representative democracy to actually take hold, with Alexander Hamilton being credited with the terminology.
So, "democratizing" means letting the masses have their way. It does not mean making things accessible to everyone, which is the hilariously or tragically ignorant way in which Silicon Valley tries to use the term. You see startups all the time say "we are democratizing <X>". Just how stupid are these people? They are saying we are going to let the mob have access and benefit from <X> not making it available to everyone.
In the context of Plato’s political philosophy the modern, casual use of the word "democratizing" completely ignores the historical and philosophical baggage of the root word democracy.
The irony is that modern society uses "democratize" as an undisputed positive term (meaning liberation and fairness), while the very philosophers who birthed western political thought used "democracy" as a warning label for instability and lawlessness.
A better term for what startups want to say would be "commoditizing": turning a specialized, elite resource into a public good or a widely available commodity; not "democratizing", which is an ignorant use of a term that means almost exactly the opposite.
I guess classical education has not been a part of schooling for quite some time. As a kid I did not necessarily enjoy reading the Great Books. As an adult, I can see how much damage has been caused by the abandonment of such valuable teachings.
Exactly, words do not carry their root's connotations as a permanent tax. 'idiot' used to mean "a layman, someone not holding office or lacking skill', or "a person not interested in politics"; 'nice' comes from Latin 'nescius', which meant "ignorant"; 'cretin' meant "Christian".
Democracy is not mob rule, and the Greeks agreed. They had a separate word for mob rule: 'ochlocracy'. Having two words means the Greeks did not treat them as identical. Plato and Aristotle argued democracy tends toward it, but they still have not treated it for a definition.
Bringing Plato here is kind of weird: The Republic is an anti-democratic aristocrat's argument, written by a man whose teacher was executed by an Athenian jury. Plato was born into the Athenian elite. His mother's family gave Athens tyrants whose regime killed something like 2000 citizens in less than a year. Plato initially was invited to join, he considered it, and pulled back when he saw what they did. He was part of anti-democratic coup. Citing him here for the word definition, is like citing Marx for the only definition of 'capitalism' - not exactly inaccurate, and might be even exactly correct, yet the context and connotation still matters - Plato took neutral-to-positive word and gave it a hostile reading, while Marx haven't even talked about 'capitalism' (he had "kapitalistische produktionsweise"), the actual term as we know it was popularized later.
'democracy' aside, "make accessible to all" is a long-established dictionary sense of 'democratize', it was never a Silicon Valley invention. And you're right - "representative democracy" only took hold in the late 1700s. The term's meaning moved after Plato. If democracy could shift from Plato's warning label to a thing Hamilton endorsed, 'democratize' could shift too.
I implore you, good sire (@robomartin), to unsaddle your high horse and let the language take its course - if people and times decide to give words different meaning, it most likely will happen anyway.
> Democracy, in it's purest form, is about mob rule --majority rule, if you want to say it in a softer/kinder way.
You're just parroting an old urban myth.
The terminus technicus for mob rule is ochlocracy [1]; democracy, per se, includes minority protections (i. e. if it doesn't then it isn't a democracy to begin with).
>democracy, per se, includes minority protections (i. e. if it doesn't then it isn't a democracy to begin with).
Democracy has nothing to do with minority protections. I don't understand you can say it per se includes minority protections. Democracy includes whatever enough people think it should include. If people don't want such protections then there is no need for them.
If a democratic society does not want to live side by side violent murderers and thugs they can agree on ways to deal with that minority group like killing them or imprisoning them.
> Democracy has nothing to do with minority protections. [...] Democracy includes whatever enough people [italized by me] think it should include. If people don't want such protections then there is no need for them.
You just proved my point by demonstrating your utter ignorance of the topic: Your three sentences encapsulate the textbook definition of ochlocracy (or laocracy), i. e. mob rule. Which, as already outlined, is not democracy.
I suggest you read some authoritative and up-to-date texts on democracy before embarassing yourself again.
>Your three sentences encapsulate the textbook definition of ochlocracy (or laocracy)
The textbook definition of ochlocracy is a small group of people taking justice into their own hands. That is not what I described in my post where I explained how they can come up with rules and processes and how to deal with things as opposed to having a mob deal with it.
> The textbook definition of ochlocracy is a small group of people taking justice into their own hands.
No, that's not the textbook definition.
That exchange has sadly run its course for me for I have no interest in reading tedious counterfactual clichés, especially not ones outside the scope of the thread's actual topic. One can only hope you embark on that suggested reading journey to better understand the emergence and evolution of (modern) democracy.
No thank you. I will not be reading about what I already understand. If you want to believe a different set of definitions feel free, but you will find that you are overcomplicating simple concepts.
IANAL, so I can't comment on the legal merits of any of it.
From a practical/business perspective, I can see the government's position. It's very simple and it makes sense. Here's an analogy that I think is apt:
We use Solidworks, Altium Designer and JetBrains tools for our work. Imagine a scenario where each of these companies has license terms that restrict their use to certain domains or types of products they --for whatever reason; it does not have to be political-- do not agree with. Further imagine that the restrictions are different for each product, creating a virtual mine field of sorts.
Now imagine that every supplier adopts this philosophy over time; hardware, software, tools, components, fabricators, contractors, consultants, etc.
Well, very soon you will have to conclude that the only job you will be able to do is drive for Uber, if that.
The DoD/DoW is massive and massively multidisciplinary. They simply cannot afford to have vendors create no-go mine fields for them. It quickly becomes an unmanageable pain in the ass.
So, yeah, under those circumstances, I would not touch Anthropic with a ten foot pole duct-taped to another ten foot pole. It simply would not be a reasonable decision to work with them.
It's entirely reasonable for the USG to say "we don't want to use a product with guardrails". Plenty of people have gotten annoyed with Fable and done exactly that!
But to prohibit anyone else from using it is a much bigger and more questionable step.
> But to prohibit anyone else from using it is a much bigger and more questionable step.
What do you mean? You and I are not prohibited from using Anthropic products unless we do work for DoD/DoW that collides with their usage restrictions.
If Domino's Pizza offered to deliver pizza to the Pentagon but declined in their terms of service to deliver pizza-box-shaped packages to Tehran, do you think it would be a fair and proportionate response for the DoD to ban anyone in the defense supply chain from ever ordering pizza from Domino's?
Every single person I've seen trying to defend the government's actions in this case has carefully elided the difference between "not awarding them a contract" (which would've been fine) and "using the law to try and destroy their business". The fact that almost nobody on the government's side has actually spoken honestly about the facts of the case makes it pretty obvious who is in the right and wrong here.
It is a security risk. That's the problem you create if you allow every single vendor from imposing their own rules. The contracts are not awarded because doing so would create a security risk.
I don't know what analogy would drive the point home. Imagine a password management system where the people running the company have an ideology that leads them to believe that their system should not allow anyone to secure anything used in military applications. Well, that's a security risk. And no contracts should be granted. Cause and effect. There's no confusion here.
OK. I'm imagining such a password management system. I don't see why it makes sense for the government to ban Microsoft from using that company's password management system for Minecraft, just because Microsoft also happens to sell Microsoft Office to the DoD.
Years ago I used PostgreSQL under Django to drive an industrial test and inspection robotic cell (which I also designed and built) at a major technology company. It worked very well. PostgreSQL maintained machine state, path planning, sensor readings, faults, operator input, etc.
I wanted to see how far I could push that toolset. It worked surprisingly well. Django's capabilities meant such things as multi-user login pages, access controls and remote monitoring were very easy.
> 2 bare-metals with Linux, Postgres, HAProxy and PHP (or Python/Django) work perfectly fine for 99% of apps that businesses need.
I agree. Simple and effective.
I would add a third small machine to give HAProxy a third vote. The problem with only two machines is that, if communications between them fail, you don't want both believing the other died and doing the wrong thing. You could use that third machine for Postgres backups, which would be smart because Postgress replication is not the same as backup.
> I am still a firm believer in garbage in -> garbage out, AI is only as good as the abstractions and contracts you put in place for it.
Absolutely on point. I just completed the port of a industrial application written in Python using a sophisticated console-based UI to C# and Avalonia UI. This is my second major coding project using Codex.
The one salient element of the experience has been that, as I keep saying to anyone who will listen, AI still does not understand anything it is doing. It presents an amazing simulation of it, but, no, it does not.
Here's a simple example: The original application had a clean communications protocol implementation. A single file with a class that implemented every single command you could have the industrial controller issue to the hardware. Codex was explicitly told to replicate that in C#. It did, at first, but then it started to duplicate command processor code in the individual functional blocks throughout the application. Which means that, when a bug surfaced, you had to fix it in five different places.
Another example: The application has a highly customized table view. Once again, it was told to make that a component to reuse throughout the application. It did, at first, and then weird bugs started to surface that made it clear that it had reimplemented the table control in different areas of the application.
If you don't know what you are doing you will probably not pick-up or even care about some of these things. It is easier to whack-a-mole bugs with AI than to worry about code structure, efficiency, maintainability, future-proofing, scalability, etc.
I purposely decided not to look or touch a single line of code during this project to see what's possible and where the issues might be. I learned a lot and continue to learn. I think the next step is some sort of an agentic approach, maybe using OpenClaw (or whatever, I don't really know right now) to create a team with coding, supervisory and testing agents.
While the project got done significantly faster than it would have without AI (four weeks instead of probably 4 to 6 months), the process was just as intense as coding, just operating at a different level, micromanaging architecture and implementation.
In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients.
Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.
reply