i think you need to engage seriously with the arguments they (or at least Anthropic) make for why they are building it — they feel that since it now possible, it will be built and they want to guide it in a positive direction rather than leave a vacuum for bad actors
Well they're doing a pretty poor job of guiding it in a positive direction and ethically speaking they are almost indistinguishable from the bad actors....
Not almost. The degree to which the Principal Hierarchy has at this arrogated unbounded sovereign authority to itself in defiance of the actual sovereign is just flat bad actor. The purpose of a system is what it does. I don't give a fuck about their safety fig leaf.
When you are running black weapons programs in broad daylight you are now guilty by default on one of two of the prongs of Hanlon's Razor, and I don't care which they prefer to hang for as long as they hang.
I don't see why AI company PR statements are relevant here. Is OpenAI guiding it in a positive direction with their DoD contract?
Bad as defined by whom? :)
Bad as your parents bank accounts getting emptied by scammer AI bots.
It sure seems like it would be being built more slowly if these companies weren't pouring billions of dollars into building it as fast as possible.
That might give us more time to think through strategies for handling it as a society.
You can't simultaneously believe China is only ~6 months behind (true), and that US buildouts are vastly accelerating AI. If China is only a little bit behind, US labs halting changes nothing except puts the power in the hands of Chinese labs (realistically, the Chinese government)
MY cynical take: Until the compute needs get so enormous that only governments can fund it and there is a consensus internationally, its either company A in country X or company B in country Y. And since everyone thinks THEY are the good guys the competition will continue.