The Industrial Revolution happened without any theoretical knowledge of the physical principles that drove it. It took more than a century for us to piece together the laws of thermodynamics. This scientific advance led to such debatably beneficial things as the smartphone. But it also helped us explain why time flows forward, galaxies exist, and our universal fate is heat death.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Now we have a special box of electricity that turns Reddit comments and old toaster manuals into cogent conversations about Shakespeare and molecular biology. The sheer competence of language models has already revamped the human quest for self-knowledge.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Amanda Askell, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, was the only person I met at Anthropic who dressed the part of a vintage cyberpunk, with cropped platinum hair and asymmetric black ensembles. She supervises what she describes as Claude’s “soul.”
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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A disproportionate number of Anthropic employees seem to be the children of novelists or poets. Still, their first stabs at screenwriting lacked a certain je ne sais quoi: in one scintillating exchange, the Human asks the Assistant if it’s actually important to add salt to spaghetti water.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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It was fine to take a devil-may-care attitude toward automated cat-identification. But it wouldn’t be fair, for example, to have a machine evaluate an applicant’s mortgage eligibility in an opaque way. And, if you employed a robot to keep your house clean of dog hair, you wanted to be certain that it would vacuum the couch, not kill the dog.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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At the time, the prevailing wisdom held that attempting to vivisect the models was tantamount to the haruspicy of the ancient Etruscans, who thought they could divine the future by inspecting animal entrails.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Dario Amodei, who has a mop of curly hair and perennially askew glasses, gives the impression of a restless savant who has been patiently coached to restrain his spasmodic energy. He was later joined at OpenAI by his younger sister, Daniela, a humanities type partial to Joan Didion.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Anthropic’s headquarters, in downtown San Francisco, sits in the shadow of the Salesforce tower. There is no exterior signage. The lobby radiates the personality, warmth, and candor of a Swiss bank.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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