Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic

Disagree. The natural, no-Anthropic, counterfactual is one in which Amazon invests billions into an alignment-agnostic AI company. On this view, Anthropic is levying a tax on AI-interest where the tax pays for alignment. I'd put this tax at 50% (rough order of magnitude number).

If Anthropic were solely funded by EA money, and didn't capture unaligned tech funds this would be worse. Potentially far worse since Anthropic impact would have to be measured against the best alternative altruistic use of the money.

I suppose you see this Amazon investment as evidence that Anthropic is profit motivated, or likely to become so. This is possible, but you'd need to explain what further factors outweigh the above. My vague impression is that outside investment rarely accidentally costs existing stakeholders control of privately held companies. Is there evidence on this point?

Yeah, not sure how much this is good news and the level of interference and vested interests that will inevitably come up. 

See Dario's Senate testimony from two months ago:

With the fast pace of progress in mind, we can think of AI risks as falling into three buckets:

●  Short-term risks are those present in current AI systems or that imminently will be present. This includes concerns like privacy, copyright issues, bias and fairness in the model’s outputs, factual accuracy, and the potential to generate misinformation or propaganda.

●  Medium-term risks are those we will face in two to three years. In that time period, Anthropic’s projections suggest that AI systems may become much better at science and engineering, to the point where they could be misused to cause large-scale destruction, particularly in the domain of biology. This rapid growth in science and engineering skills could also change the balance of power between nations.

●  Long-term risks relate to where AI is ultimately going. At present, most AI systems are passive and merely converse with users, but as AI systems gain more and more autonomy and ability to directly manipulate the external world, we may face increasing challenges in controlling them. There is a spectrum of problems we could face related to this, at the extreme end of which is concerns about whether a sufficiently powerful AI, without appropriate safeguards, could be a threat to humanity as a whole – referred to as existential risk. Left unchecked, highly autonomous, intelligent systems could also be misused or simply make catastrophic mistakes.

Note that there are some concerns, like AI’s effects on employment, that don’t fit neatly in one bucket and probably take on a different form in each time period.

Short-term risks are in the news every day and are certainly important. I expect we’ll have many opportunities to discuss these in this hearing, and much of Anthropic’s research applies immediately to those risks: our constitutional AI principles include attempts to reduce bias, increase factual accuracy, and show respect for privacy, copyright, and child safety. Our red-teaming is designed to reduce a wide range of these risks, and we have also published papers on using AI systems to correct their own biases and mistakes. There are a number of proposals already being considered by the Congress relating to these risks.

The long-term risks might sound like science fiction, but I believe they are at least potentially real. Along with the CEOs of other major AI companies and a number of prominent AI academics (including my co-witnesses Professors Russell and Bengio) I have signed a statement emphasizing that these risks are a challenge humanity should not neglect. Anthropic has developed evaluations designed to measure precursors of these risks and submitted its models to independent evaluators. And our work on interpretability is also designed to someday help with long-term risks. However, the abstract and distant nature of long-term risks makes them hard to approach from a policy perspective: our view is that it may be best to approach them indirectly by addressing more imminent risks that serve as practice for them.

The medium-term risks are where I would most like to draw the subcommittee’s attention. Simply put, a straightforward extrapolation of the pace of progress suggests that, in 2-3 years, AI systems may facilitate extraordinary insights in broad swaths of many science and engineering disciplines. This will cause a revolution in technology and scientific discovery, but also greatly widen the set of people who can wreak havoc. In particular, I am concerned that AI systems could be misused on a grand scale in the domains of cybersecurity, nuclear technology, chemistry, and especially biology.

Yes, it's total hubris. And many at OpenAI and DeepMind feel the same way - their company alone can save the world (and prevent the other AI companies from ending it). This is the other AI arms race. It's as dangerous as the e/acc one. No regard for the fact that the public does not want them to do this.

It seems pretty clear that Amazon's intent is to have state of the art AI backing Alexa. That alone would not be particularly concerning. The problem would be if Amazon has some leverage to force Anthropic to accelerate capabilities research and neglect safety - which is certainly possible, but it seems like Anthropic wants to avoid it by keeping Amazon as a minority investor and maintaining the existing governance structure.

I interpret it as broadly the latter based on the further statements in the Twitter thread, though I could well be wrong.

Um, conditional on any AI labs being in a race in what way are Anthropic not already racing?