Alek Dimitriev retweeted
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
It was an amazing experience, @growing_daniel showed us that you can just do things
Last night @growing_daniel built one of the best experiences I have had all year. These are the only photos I have.
He screened “You Can See Everything” and did 2 simple things:
1) Phones were sealed in security bags at the beginning. The 30 minutes before screening were electric, people all talking, laughing, present
2) Every event is a magic trick, and every magic trick needs a prestige. His: a surprise, off the record Q&A after a 3 hour movie. 99% of the room stayed. The guest had been sitting in the dark watching it with us the whole time, and the conversation felt like the sequel dropping the second the credits rolled. @cyantist and I kept turning to each other like, "is this the Truman Show??"
Magic is magic. 🪄 bravo.
PS Daniel of course would staff his own event and put wrist bands on everyone.
Alek Dimitriev retweeted
Another angle to this is that dogs effectively stumbled onto what is for them the equivalent of artificial superintelligence 20,000 years ago. The Singularity already happened for dogs. They live in a world they cannot understand, surrounded by miraculous wonders they take entirely for granted, their every need seen to by entities whose thoughts they cannot begin to fathom.
The result is that there are about a billion dogs on the planet now. Most of them are pretty happy. Almost none of them need to work. It worked out pretty well for them.
We got ratio'd hard last time we went public about distillation. But a lot has changed in 6 months. What does X think now?
Over the last few months, we’ve made significant progress in reducing the effectiveness of distillation attacks against Claude.
In this post, we explain how: anthropic.com/research/disti…
Met the creator of ideadetector.ai
which doesn't just tell you whether the words are slop, but the core ideas behind the text as well. Try it out on your friends' posts!
Alek Dimitriev retweeted
An unfortunate consequence of rampant distillation from Claude is that when we screwed up its ability to speak like a normal person earlier this year the entire ecosystem went down with us.
To be fair, EAs also caused the first problem
Here are the first 4 problems on 80000 Hour's most pressing problem page in Dec 2019 web.archive.org/web/20191224…
We really can't fathom how crazy it was to find another continent on the other side of the ocean full of millions of people and thriving civilizations. Imagine if we landed humans on the dark side of the moon in 1969 and there was a billion people living there in a moonopolis
New episode with military historian Si Sheppard.
The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history.
Hernan Cortés and some hundreds of Conquistadors landed on a new continent they knew basically nothing about, and within 2 and a half years, conquered the 6 million strong Aztec empire.
Then, a decade later, Francisco Pizarro did the same thing to an Incan Empire of some 10 million inhabitants.
In both cases, the Conquistadors consistently beat native armies while being literally 100x (or even in some cases 1000x) outnumbered - and in many cases, did so without taking a single casualty.
And they did this with 99% of their military forces being made up of the very natives they were trying to subjugate.
We often forget how wild human history is. People talk about AI takeover as if it would be some crazy, unprecedented sci-fi outcome. But this would not be the first time an alien force whose motives the defenders barely understand use more advanced technology and diplomatic cunning to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and long established existing order.
0:00:00 – Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs
0:22:39 – Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca
0:26:59 – Explaining Conquistador military superiority
0:34:39 – Could the natives have beat the Conquistadors?
0:48:56 – The Aztecs and Incas did not learn from each other
0:56:11 – Why Spain still lost in the long run
1:07:47 – Why didn’t the Aztecs/Incas adapt better to European warfare?
1:14:16 – Conquistador motivation
1:26:22 – Why Mughal India also couldn't play the Europeans off each other
1:33:42 – Diplomacy was just as important as technology
Alek Dimitriev retweeted
The Avalon Exposition is one month away!
Join us for a weekend celebrating the study of mankind - from anthropology to theater, from military history to genetics, and live music from Sikh Tabla to the Ancient Greek lyre
Bring your own art and thought!
avalon.institute/exposition/…
