The first person I’m introduced to is a woman who looks like Daryl Hannah’s android in Blade Runner, beaming in on a TV screen. A bleach-haired goth, Amanda Askell is a philosophy PhD who did her dissertation at NYU on moral uncertainty. She was one of the first 10 employees, and her actual job has been to give Claude a personality. She’s Scottish and enjoys bagpipe music.
~ Joe Hagan via Vanity Fair.
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The accelerationists believe we’re on the verge of solving every problem humanity has ever faced as they race to break things, even if one of the things that breaks is civilization. The doomers fret over rogue superintelligence, an AI that accidentally eliminates us while fulfilling a paper clip order. And the skeptics say this is all corporate hype chasing billions in investment while the actual tech sputters with hallucinations and errors, choking on real-world problems.
~ Joe Hagan via Vanity Fair.
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Anthropic has branded itself as the AI company with humanity in mind, drawing red lines with the Pentagon over using its AI for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, supposedly for moral reasons. But Claude was already used to abduct the leader of Venezuela and send missiles to targets in Iran.
~ Joe Hagan via Vanity Fair.
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The people building these systems—Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis—have made it clear that everybody from writers and actors to tax accountants and war strategists are on the chopping block. Of all the wizards of modern AI, Dario Amodei, the theoretical physicist who founded Anthropic, maker of Claude, is the most publicly anxious about the impact of his product on the world at large, seemingly spooked by his own predictions.
~ Joe Hagan via Vanity Fair.
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