I do think it's fair to consider the work on GPT-3 a failure of judgement and a bad sign about Dario's commitment to alignment, even if at the time (also based on LinkedIn) it sounds like he was also still leading other teams focused on safety research. 

(I've separately heard rumors that Dario and the others left because of disagreements with OpenAI leadership over how much to prioritize safety, and maybe partly related to how OpenAI handled the GPT-3 release, but this is definitely in the domain of hearsay and I don't think anything has been shared publicly about it.) 

Edited first line, which hopefully clarifies this better. 

It's deliberate that this post covers mostly specifics that I learned from Anthropic staff, and further speculation is going to be in a separate later post. I wanted to make a really clear distinction between "these are things that were said to me about Anthropic by people who have context" (which is, for the most part, people in favor of Anthropic's strategy), and my own personal interpretation and opinion on whether Anthropic's work is net positive, which is filtered through my worldview and which I think most people at Anthropic would disagree with. 

Part two is more critical, which means I want to write about it with a lot of effort and care, so I expect I'll put it up in a week or two. 

My sense is that it's been somewhere in between – on some occasions staff have brought up doubts, and the team did delay a decision until they were addressed, but it's hard to judge how much the end result was a different decision from what would have been made otherwise, versus just happening later. 

The sense I've gotten of the culture is compatible with (current) Anthropic being a company that would change their entire strategic direction if staff started coming in with credible arguments that "what if we shouldn't be advancing capabilities?", but I think this hasn't yet been put to the test – people who choose work at Anthropic are going to be selected for agreeing on the premises behind the Anthropic strategy – and it's hard to know for sure how it would go. 

Your summary seems fine! 

Why do you need to do all of this on current models? I can see arguments for this, for instance, perhaps certain behaviors emerge in large models that aren’t present in smaller ones.

I think that Anthropic's current work on RL from AI Feedback (RLAIF) and Constitutional AI is based on large models exhibiting behaviors that don't work in smaller models? (But it'd be neat if someone more knowledgeable than me wanted to chime in on this!) 

My current best understanding is that running state of the art models is expensive in terms of infrastructure and compute, the next generation models will get even more expensive to train and run, and Anthropic doesn't have (and doesn't expect to realistically be able to get) enough philanthropic funding to work on the current best models let alone future ones – so they need investment and revenue streams, 

There's also a consideration that Anthropic wants to have influence in AI governance/policy spaces, where it helps to have a reputation/credibility as one of the major stakeholders in AI work.

W h a t  that's wild, wow, I would absolutely not have predicted DALL-E could do that! (I'm curious whether it replicates in other instances.) 

Tragically DALL-E still cannot spell, but here you go:

"A group of happy people does Circling and Authentic Relating in a park"

"A Rube Goldberg machine made out of candy, Sigma 85mm f/1.4 high quality photograph"

I've been experimenting with some style prompts suggested on Twitter, so have "A complex Rube Goldberg machine, Sigma 85mm f/1.4 high quality photograph"

"Cute White Cat Plushie On A Bed, 4K resolution, amateur photography"

Slightly modified because 'shooting' is a banned keyword: "A cartoon honey badger wearing a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu GI with a black belt, jumping in for a wrestling takedown"

"Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects, as a screenshot from the movie Prometheus" came out weirdly video-game-esque? 

"Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects, as a medieval painting"

And this didn't come out all that medieval-style, so I tried again with "Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects, as a medieval illuminated manuscript"

"Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects, as a screenshot from South Park"

"A 3D rendering of the number 5"

"Number 8". Huh I think these are almost all street numbers on houses/buildings? 

"The letters X Y and Z" ok it's starting to get confused here.... (My prediction is that it'll manage the number 8 and number 5 in the next prompts, but if I try a 3-digit number it might flail).

Let's see! 

"The letter A"

"A little forest gnome leaving through his magic book - beautiful and detailed illustration"

"A piggo-saurus - an illustration of a pig-like dinosaur"

"A piggo-saurus - a pig-like dinosaur - hyper realistic art"

"A wild boar and an angel walking side by side along the beach - beautiful hyperrealistic art"

Yeah, no, it just gives me...cats.

Tweaked the prompt multiple times and this is the best I got re: tights and not stockings, I think DALL-E just has very strong priors on "stockings" going with this art style. "Girl wearing a beautiful white dress over white leggings. She is beside another happy girl with black hair wearing a dress over black leggings. The sun is behind the two, dramatic lighting, Anime fanart, safebooru, deviantart, advanced digital art settings, behance 8k super-quality beautiful"

Yeahhhh, as I expected DALL-E cannot super follow the negation here. (We also tried to ask it for "a stop sign, spelled incorrectly" and it just gave us stop signs.) 

Ooooh! Yeah, definitely much more fantasy fan art style. 

The AI is sort of trying to make this photographs, but I am judging that none of them are in danger of being photorealistic faces... 

"A white haired girl wearing white tights. She is beside another girl with black hair wearing opaque black tights and blushing. Anime fanart, danbooru, deviantart, advanced digital art settings"

Well, this is the DALL-E attempt! not quite the same but definitely intriguing. 

just the image - I had uploaded them as new images bc it cleared my session and I didn't have the originals anymore. 

(Oops, really sorry, it closes out my session every so often and I don't have the originals for this anymore.)

"A woman riding a horse, in the style of DALLE-2"

Here we are! 

It tries! 

Plus your other request, "Black robots wearing gold chains and red robes sitting in thrones made of white crystal with gold spikes lined up. The robots are holding plates with fries and ice cream over white sinks in front of their thrones facing a mirror, in a red luxury bathroom full of gold coins and doors, and white and red ruby pots." Honestly pretty impressed with the level of detail in the image! 

Gotcha! Gold room variations here:

And the Mario game variations: 

"A man with a blue shirt walking through a dark hallway, in the style of Blade Runner 2049" Well, it apparently thinks I just want the hallway lighting to be blue, which is a pretty common sort of thing for it. Otherwise seems at least kind of Blade Runner-esque? 

"A bronze statue of three wise monkeys." Pretty solid! 

"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, statue of monkeys."

Here you go! 

I have tried that! As far as I can tell it doesn't make much of a difference.

"What people from 1920 thought 2020 would look like. 1920's Artist's depiction of 2020"

"Axis and Allies board game 2022 setup. Digital image official concept." (I'll maybe play around a bit with the wording to see if I can get something more dramatic.) 

OpenAI has a waitlist you can sign up for to get early access to DALL-E. 

This came out super cute! Thanks for the prompt idea :) 

It's having some trouble with the shadow person, but definitely a cute cat! 

For the second request, I'm not sure I follow - are these results from previous prompt rounds that I ran? 

"Black robots wearing gold chains and red robes sitting in thrones made of white crystal with gold spikes lined up. The robots are holding plates with fries and ice cream over white sinks in front of their thrones facing a mirror, in a red luxury bathroom full of gold coins and doors, and white and red ruby pots."