Karpathy is talented and to me he always seemed like someone who would be against building something like skynet. Anthropic is lucky to have him.
Karpathy is talented and to me he always seemed like someone who would be against building something like skynet. Anthropic is lucky to have him.
Honestly, if Skynet were possible, Anthropic would probably build it first and claim they had to because OpenAI is bad.
And then regulatory capture it to death. Seriously, Anthropic is top notch in their coding models, but they are not the good guys in the tech vs. product for humanity's sake debate.
yeah but i don't think there's any large org which is 'good guys'. Anyone who wants to become a monopoly or very very large is probably suffering from some sort of a neural condition (psychosis, if plural) which we will study 100 years from now. Right now they are rewarded but I think our little minds forget to take the negative externalities into account.
I am working on a short story on this topic which is set in 2100s, where most humans have internalized the concept of 'having enough' after the great conflict. But some specimen have started to show signs of this syndrome again, and neuroscientists and psychologists are grappling to understand where it originated from.
The difference is that Anthropic pretend they're the good guys, while the rest don't.
Come on, Anthropic ARE the good guys if there are any. Certainly the incentives of trillions will do what money does, but they have assembled an incredibly altruistic and philosophically-minded crew. I’m rooting for them and trying real hard not to get cynical.
It's like the Mike prince arc in the show billions
yeah but i don't think there's any large org which is 'good guys'.
There are several. They're in China, releasing competitive open-weight models on a regular basis.
I thought "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is the most accepted wisdom on HN? At least when it comes to services from FB or Google. But if that comes from China they are the "good guys"?
Good luck "productizing" a model running on the GPU in my basement with no Internet access. I wouldn't use them via a cloud provider, though.
Ah yes, the famous altruistic China, no profit or geopolitical/national security motives, doing it all purely for the love of the game.
Well, no, they're doing it to hose the US labs. But their releases have the effect of empowering individual users, which is a good bellwether of good-versus-evil in my book.
We can only blame ourselves for everything that happens as a result. For instance, the effect of US government sanctions on high-performance GPUs has been to force Chinese researchers to do more with less. It will be years before they can bring their own fabs up to speed, but they now understand that a Manhattan Project level of effort is called for, and their AI labs aren't going to drag their feet in the meantime. This is how we ended up with a 27B model that can run with the big dogs from only one generation ago.
I hope they keep releasing weights, but don't know how optimistic to be about that.
Totally. They are the only ones who said no to letting their tech being used for illegal use cases.
This doesn't automatically make them the great virtuous team. It just means the rest of the pack are toxic as all hell.
They didn’t even take the position that it was unethical to participate in surveillance and kill chains, just that the tech isn’t ready yet so it’s irresponsible to use it that way.
The position they took sounds much more politically feasible than the one you suggest they should've taken, at a time when the White House was threatening them with the Defense Production Act.
No such thing as good or bad guys in business, only good or bad action. If you NitpickLawyer has a business, I'm sure there will be people calling for your head, no matter what your intentions are. The bigger the customer base the more "evil" you'd become. Everyone have their own interest which often conflict.
So... do you see a problem with regulating skynet to not kill us all?
Anthropic has drawn lines with the most powerful organization in the world, that OpenAI capitulated on within hours for a small contract.
Their statement on this issue opened by emphasizing how eager they are to help kill people:
>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.
It's not controversial to say that democracy is a more ethical form of government than autocracy. It's also not controversial to say that violence is sometimes justified when it's in self-defence or to prevent a greater injustice from happening. So what's the ethical objection to that statement?
You gave two statements which are different from what I quoted.
The idea of "defend[ing] the United States and other democracies" and "defeat[ing] our autocratic adversaries" are always the stated reasons for US military action. Iraq was certainly an "autocratic adversary" and hundreds of thousands of people died from the war there. Vietnam was about "defending democracies" and resulted in millions of people dying. These are atrocities on an incomprehensible scale.
The ethical objection is very simple. War is evil, and the military is in the business of war.
I wonder if GP subscribes to the narrative of moral equivalence between things the Iranian regime does (such as slaughtering crowds of anti-government protestors) and what Hamas does (such as the butchery and terror committed against innocent civilians on Oct 7th) and any deaths or injuries that occur directly attributable to a US military action. If so, then I suppose they'd say it's fair to condemn the US as evil because deaths have happened, after all. Pacifism and turning a blind eye to anything happening in another sovereign country seems like what that particular worldview advocates. Iran isn't pacifist, but would definitely like it if their geopolitical rivals would adopt pacifism.
It's frankly controversial to consider the US the arbiter of supposed democracy.
Especially given the context of these press releases was right at the height of "we'll have Greenland one way or another" pronouncements.
Anthropic showed their belly same as OpenAI anyways.
"ethical" is not a word that carries the connotation of a universally agreed upon set of behaviors. Different peoples, groups, and cultures vary in what they consider acceptable behavior.
Let me rephrase this.
Anthropic played a really well orchestrated marketing gimmick so that they would be in the headlines for a couple days bringing awareness to non-tech people on how they are supposedly the good guys. They then backpedaled all of this and are in contract with the DoD once the headlines passed.
But this obviously worked as you now believe they are the good guys
They didn't backpedal at all, you're spreading FUD.
Their red lines are still in place. They are the only AI company with those red lines.
Ah yes, right
[1] https://www.obsolete.pub/p/exclusive-anthropic-is-quietly-ba... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/25/tech/anthropic-safety-pol... [3] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-dials-back-ai-safety-c...
Those sources don’t claim Anthropic is crossing its red lines (AI-controlled weapons and mass domestic surveillance of American citizens).
You didn't read your own sources. The red lines are still in place.
Oh I read them. If I had to bet I follow this more closely than you do.
Some redlines are still in place. Not the same ones and it is very clear based on this precedent that red lines can be moved at any times whenever it is convenient for Anthropic as shown by the above articles.
So as I said, all a marketing gimmick.
100% and that was bold and set a good example, at least from the outside.
...and then silently got back to talks with DoD [0] and gave them the Mythos model. Separately, they went back on their promise to only develop models that they can guarantee are safe [1]. I reckon considering which country they are HQ'ed in, building skynet is in their destiny.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/01/pentagon-anthropic-blacklist...
[1] https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/anthropic-...
Exactly.
This good guy ("AI Safety") versus bad guy is all marketing gimmicks. I'm old enough that it reminds me of Google "don't be evil".
What I find worse is that some people actually believe Anthropic are really the good guys.
You should chat with some people involved in AI safety, if you really think it's a farce.
There's a wide variety of seriousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIg4zQKBpAs
Imagine being gullible enough to think any of those companies would ever chose AI safety over losing their monopolies in AI.
AI safety is important. My point is: you should have zero trust in those companies to actually care about AI Safety besides the marketing and PR aspect of it. Incentives matter.
Dunno, Anthropic delayed Mythos and refused to break their red lines for the DoW. But you seem to harbor this irrational hatred for them and the AI safety crowd so I'm not sure this discussion has much value.
Delaying mythos has been the most effective free marketing campaign you could ever imagine. "Our model is so good and dangerous we cannot release it yet" giving you free press and coverage as you prove here once again.
>> this irrational hatred for them and the AI safety crowd
You seem to equal AI Safety with Anthropic. That's where I disagree completely. I love AI Safety but I will not make the obvious mistake in believing Anthropic have any goal in AI Safety beyond whatever will give them free marketing. Again, incentives matter.
You seem to work for them or have vested interest in them. There is no point in continuing here as it is tough to make you understand something when your salary depends on you not understanding it.
Skynet is being built on the Ukrainian/Russian front lines.
And it is sad some people are thinking Karpathy or Karp are persons of any benevolence.
If you look at his recent content, I think he's gotten LLM Psychosis unfortunately
Hypothetically you take the leading expert of a field and say "they believe in their own field too much - far more than I do as a layman - and therefore surely must have psychosis."
Why should I trust that your assessment is correct? Is it likely to ever be correct in the case of a doctor/mechanical engineer/athlete/economist/whatever? So why do so many people insist that an incredibly intelligent AI researcher has fallen into some obvious trap?
Because we're paying attention? A lot of "smart" people are lost in the AI sauce, grandstanding that they are going to change the very fabric of society. Generally leading experts in other fields are not making the same hyperbolic, self-indulgent, embarrassing statements.
At risk of being "lost in the AI sauce", do you seriously believe that AI isn't actively changing the fabric of society? Almost feels like we're living in totally different realities if that isn't clear-cut
I still put my pants on the same way, eat the same food, talk to my friends and family the same way. I drive to the grocery store, pick out the same food and cook food at the same home. Talk to my kids, take them to activities and watch Bluey.
The only time my reality has changed is when I spend time at a computer or on my phone and even then, its a fraction of the total time. So no, it's not a "totally different reality" for me.
Have you considered that maybe the experts in a field are actually correct about that field?
have you considered that at any second all our existing knowledge could be rendered redundant on the frontier these experts work in?
Kinda funny that you are asking "how does one judge someone?" while apparently not understanding how to judge someone.
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