I am a fairly cynical person. Anthropic could have made this statement at any time, but they chose to do it when OpenAI says they are going to start showing ads, so view it in that context. They are saying this to try to get people angry about ads to drop OpenAI and move to Anthropic. For them, not having ads supports their current objective.
When you accept the amount of investments that these companies have, you don't get to guide your company based on principles. Can you imagine someone in a boardroom saying, "Everyone, we can't do this. Sure it will make us a ton of money, but it's wrong!" Don't forget, OpenAI had a lot of public goodwill in the beginning as well. Whatever principles Dario Amodei has as an individual, I'm sure he can show us with his personal fortune.
Parsing it is all about intention. If someone drops coffee on your computer, should you be angry? It depends on if they did it on purpose, or it was an accident. When a company posts a statement that ads are incongruous to their mission, what is their intention behind the message?
> Anthropic could have made this statement at any time, but they chose to do it when OpenAI says they are going to start showing ads, so view it in that context.
Obviously they did do it for that reason, but it does make sense. They've positioned themselves from day 1 as the AI company built on more values; that doesn't make them good but it's self-consistent. If, out of the blue earlier on when nobody was talking about ads in AI, they said "we're not going to put ads in AI", that would have been a Suspiciously Specific Denial: "our shirt saying we're not going to put ads in AI has people asking a lot of questions already answered by our shirt".
> Can you imagine someone in a boardroom saying, "Everyone, we can't do this. Sure it will make us a ton of money, but it's wrong!"
Yes. But that's not how you'd say it. "First of all, this would go against our established ethical principles, which you knew when you invested with us. Second, those ethical principles define our position in the market, which we should not abandon."
Ideally, ethical buyers would cause the market to line up behind ethical products. For that to be possible, we have to have choices available to us. Seems to me Anthropic is making such a choice available to see if buyers will line up behind it.
“Ideally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Wow. Well said.