[Linkpost] Google invested $300M in Anthropic in late 2022

I wouldn't want to work for Anthropic in any position where I thought I might someday be pressured to do capabilities work, or "alignment research" that had a significant chance of turning out to be capabilities work. If your impression is that there's a good chance of that happening, or there's some other legitimization type effect I'm not considering, then I'll save myself the trouble of applying.

One piece of data: I haven't been working at Anthropic for very long so far, but I have easily been able to avoid and haven't personally felt pressured to do any capability-relevant stuff. In terms of other big labs, my guess is that would also be true at DeepMind, but would not be true at OpenAI.

My current model is that Anthropic has illegitimately taken up the flag of "big ML place that the people who want to avoid race dynamics go to" while basically doing most of the relevant work to be competitive, continuing to do tons of things that enhance race dynamics (e.g. being for-profit, aggressive fundraising rounds, massive staff size of just good engineers i.e. not the sort of x-risk-conscious people who would gladly stop their work if the leadership thought it was getting too close to AGI, developing cutting edge language models, etc), and the leadership basically having pretty poor models of alignment (e.g. I don't know that any Anthropic staff are doing any work to implement experiments on even Paul's ideas; I have also heard people who know them saying that they expect engineering leadership would not feel very concerned if their systems showed signs of deception [EDIT: see bottom of comment for update]), and broadly having little of the reasons to trust their judgment on these questions in the way I trust a few other people like Eliezer or Paul or John or Gwern — given that Dario/Daniela have written exceedingly little of their models and plans publicly, and from my occasional conversations with insiders literally don't have plans other that don't sound to me like "get as close to AGI as possible and then pause and do research with those AIs, probably this will work out fine".

Might be wrong of course, but no way really to know, given the aforementioned lack of detailed explanations (or any really) of their views on the alignment problem and how to solve it.

That said, cybersecurity does sound interesting and potentially something that will extend timelines if it prevents foreign actors from stealing data, so could still be worth it (though Anthropic just got funding from Google, and if that relationship sustains, I presume that they will have access to Google's cyberecurity folks? I honestly don't know how competent they will be — whether they're nailing it or will have given up on state-actor-level security). Also attempting to influence the leadership positively sounds potentially worthwhile.

Added: I recently heard a third-hand story of someone working there on scaling-up who said "I just think Dario's plan is good". When asked what Dario's plan was, they said "Well, I think what I mean is that I just trust him to do the right thing when the time comes." If this is accurate, then from my perspective, this is worse than Dario having a bad plan, because you can at least give a counter-argument to a bad plan. Someone with no plan doesn't even have something to discuss. If you don't have a plan, you can't notice when it doesn't match up with reality.

Edit: I PM'd with Evan, after his comment below, and it now seems to me that in the last 1.5 years Anthropic leadership has probably updated toward being more concerned about deceptive models.