I don't understand why any business would endeavor to not benefit all people. Like, we should expect grocery stores to benefit bad people. We should expect payment processors to benefit bad people. We should expect clothing retailers to benefit bad people. The goal shouldn't be to prevent bad people from benefitting, the goal should be to prevent bad people from leveraging your business toward their malicious aims. Even the worst people have completely neutral or even benevolent objectives some of the time.
The context of that quote was around finding funding from UAE / Saudi Arabia / etc
If you run a clothing shop you don't need to take investment from bad people. Yes everyone gets to wear the clothes / use the ai model. But that wasn't what he was talking about (and in that same leaked memo was enthusiastic about giving more people access to Claude)
> The context of that quote was around finding funding from UAE / Saudi Arabia / etc If you run a clothing shop you don't need to take investment from bad people.
Are you saying that the UAE and Saudi Arabia investors are bad people and so it is immoral to take funding from them?
That depends on whether or not you think torturing and dismembering a citizen who in your embassy is bad.
Maybe this is just a fundamental moral divide but a lot of people do think it's reasonable for someone to say that a grocery store shouldn't sell guns, or that a payment processor shouldn't process gun sales. Just for one example.
If you love guns, substitute something else you dislike. Currently people are aggressively pushing to prohibit the sale of adult entertainment, for example, and doing so by trying to get payment processors to block those transactions.
It's very common for people to hold the opinion that stores and payment processors should be opinionated as well and discriminate in terms of what they allow to be bought or sold.
And that's completely ignoring the question of how laws governing commerce interact with this. If you do business with a sanctioned entity the government's going to get angry real quick AFAIK, regardless of whether the business was itself harmless.
> the goal should be to prevent bad people from leveraging your business toward their malicious aims
Someone can wield your product in ways you cannot foresee or even if you can foresee, cannot prevent. Even if you could prevent, it would likely require spying on customers, which I don’t know is the right tradeoff.