真正的Anthropic请站起来
公司多年来精通讲故事 IPO会揭露面具背后的公司还是更深入地走进神话中？
这个故事最初出现在我们关于AI的每周通讯The Algorithm上。 要把这样的故事放进你的收件箱先在这里签名
经过数周的疯狂猜测，Anthropic已经提交了它的IPO peopleus. 这份长达335页的文件(100页左右)以风险为焦点，阐述了公司对其正在建设的技术的独特观点，以及公司认为它将改变世界的方式。
但是Anthropic多年来一直在磨练讲故事的技能。 事实上，它的公开信息是叙事捕捉的大师课。
本月早些时候，公司的共同创始人兼政策负责人杰克·克拉克在曼谷IMF会议上发表了演讲，他在会上向聚集在一起的经济学家、银行家和立法者发表演讲，指出奇点已经在这里。
推出由科幻小说家和未来主义者弗诺·温格(Vernor Vinge)在大约40年前(并且长期在网络的书呆子边缘上争论)提出，奇点应该是技术获得如此好到超过制造者能力的地方。
人类被抛在尘埃中，思想消失，不再能够与他们以前创造的果实竞争，甚至无法理解。
我们很多人从小就想象的这个虚构的世界？Clark告诉观众：「我相信今年我们已经获得令人信服的证据
公司讲述了一个生动(在许多方面是恐怖的)故事，讲述它描绘的未来是不可避免的，但至今还没有发生，常常是同化自成熟的科幻迷因。 它将其技术呈现为神秘和危险，并坚持认为它是唯一一个足以驯服它值得信赖的公司。 (哪个投资者不想参与其中？)
举个例子去年，另一位Anthropic联合创始人克里斯·奥拉赫应邀在梵蒂冈演讲，他在那里告诉教宗利奥十四世和其他宗教学者和官员，他的公司正在了解有关其技术的情况。 称表示，“我们找到反省的证据。 我们发现内部的状态在功能上反映了快乐、满足、恐惧、悲伤和不安。”
Anthropic的软件具有人性的内在体验，Anthropic(和它的同行边境AI公司)说
我并不是说他们一定错了。 (这是另一天。 ) Anthropic等公司可以填补真空。
Anthropic是什么？但回答比你想的要困难得多。
上星期我读到关于X的交流文章后，加尔文对Anthropic在秘密向美国立法者散发的法案草案中提议的立法感到不快(后来被泄露).
Anthropic希望被视为好人，卡尔文·称。 但我们为什么要相信它？他问“Anthropic是什么？”
Anthropic是一个IPO价值超过1.5万亿美元的公司
但Anthropic一直坚持认为它不止于此。 正如Calvin所指出的：Anthropic可被视为AI安全组织，其重点是开发可靠和(几乎)无风险的强大技术。 或许是因为他们相信自己是最负责任的人，也可能是因为他们的自负。
事实上，Anthropic就是所有这些东西。 正如首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代(Dario Amodei)在回应卡尔文(Calvin)的文章时所说：“ 我们的策略一直是我所说的`种族至上'，将比赛推向顶峰的力量，我为我们的成绩感到自豪
阿莫代听起来好像他把一切都绑起来了，例如，AI安全组织的优先事项与以利润为驱动的巨型公司之间存在巨大的紧张关系。 (阿莫代在职位上承认自己犯了错误。
Anthropic的故事最终会帮助我们理解它告诉我们的故事。 他们应该帮助我们确定，我们在多大程度上相信它能够自我调节，或者我们是否应该迫使它让外部安全测试人员能够以我们的条件而不是他们的条件接触它的模型。 他们应该帮助我们，当看似自私的立法被曝光时，给予怀疑(或不怀疑)的好处。
但我认为故事揭示了一个多头海德拉。 Anthropic对许多人来说是很多事情，在许多方面，一个好的老式技术公司——没有科幻角色扮演，没有伍宇——会更容易阅读。
深潜
人工智能
不要被愚弄-LLMs没有道理
AlphaGo对阵Go冠军李赛铎十年后
“我们看错了”：破坏AI世界的爆炸性说法
他的2.6万字的病毒博客文章中
别被这个夏日的爱尔胡同所愚弄
关于AGI的无呼吸声称和新能力在严格审查下迅速瓦解。
美国花费数十亿用于边境监视。 为何不能在人们死前抓住他们？
监视塔日益由大赦国际提供动力，它保证对过境点作出更快的反应。 我们对塔台附近死亡事件的调查发现，它们未能交付。
保持连接
从
麻省理工学院技术审查
发现特别的报价，顶级故事，即将到来的事件等等。
本文由 AI图鉴自动抓取并翻译，版权归原作者所有；如需查看原文请点下方链接。
Will the real Anthropic please stand up
The company has been masterful at storytelling for years. Will the IPO reveal the company behind the mask or lean deeper into the myth-making?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
After weeks of frenzied speculation, Anthropic has filed its IPO prospectus. The 335-page document (100 pages or so are focused on risks) lays out the company’s unique view of the technology it is building and the ways it believes it will change the world.
But Anthropic has been honing its storytelling skills for years. In fact, its public messaging is a master class in narrative capture.
Earlier this month, Jack Clark, the company’s cofounder and head of policy, gave a speech at the IMF meeting in Bangkok in which he announced to the assembled economists, bankers, and lawmakers that the singularity is already here.
Introduced by the science fiction writer and futurist Vernor Vinge around 40 years ago (and long debated on the nerdier fringes of the internet), the singularity is supposed to be the point at which technology gets so good that it outstrips the abilities of its makers.
Humans are left in the dust, the idea goes, no longer able to compete with—or even understand—the fruits of their former creation.
And this fictional world that many of us have imagined since we were kids? Apparently we’re already living in it: “I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun,” Clark told his audience.
The company tells a vivid (and in many ways scary) story about a future it portrays as inevitable but one that has not yet happened, often co-opted from well-worn science fiction memes. It presents its technology as mysterious and dangerous, and insists that it is the only company trustworthy enough to tame it. (What investor wouldn’t want in on that?)
Take another example. Last year, Chris Olah, another Anthropic cofounder, was invited to address the Vatican, where he told Pope Leo XIV and other religious scholars and officials what his company was learning about its technology. “I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.”
Never mind that many researchers would scoff at such an overt suggestion that Anthropic’s software has humanlike inner experience. When so little seems certain, what Anthropic (and its fellow frontier AI companies) say is snatched up and clung to like pieces of a sinking ship.
I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong about any of this. (That’s for another day.) But in a world where nobody knows what’s coming, companies like Anthropic get to fill the vacuum.
It’s worth taking a moment to ask: What is Anthropic? It might sound like a starter question on a family quiz show, but it’s far harder to answer than you might think.
The question has been on my mind since reading an exchange on X last week kicked off by Nathan Calvin, who is chief strategy officer at Encode AI, an organization based in Washington, DC, that advocates for regulation. Calvin was unhappy about the legislation that Anthropic proposed in a draft bill it circulated in secret to US lawmakers (which was then leaked).
Anthropic wants to be seen as the good guy, Calvin said. But why should we trust it? “What is Anthropic?” he asked.
Here’s one answer: Anthropic is a company whose IPO values it at more than $1.5 trillion, netting its cofounders, including Clark and Olah, vast wealth.
But Anthropic has always insisted it is more than that. As Calvin noted: Anthropic might instead be considered an AI safety organization focused on developing powerful technology that is reliable and (almost) risk-free. Or it might be considered a group of people hell-bent on creating a technology with superhuman capabilities before anyone else—maybe because they believe they’re the most responsible people to do so, or maybe because of their egos.
In fact, Anthropic is all of these things. As CEO Dario Amodei put it in a reply to Calvin’s post: “Our strategy has always been what I’ve called the ‘race to the top’—by showing how it’s possible to build the technology responsibly, we can raise the bar for the entire industry. The forces that drive the race to the top are hugely more effective if the company practicing them is at the frontier; that’s one lesson I’ve learned repeatedly. And looking at that strategy as a whole, I’m proud of our track record and stand by it.”
Amodei makes it sound as if he’s got it all tied up, but playing multiple roles is hard. There are huge tensions between the priorities of an AI safety organization and a profit-driven megacorp, for example. (Amodei admits in his post that he has made mistakes.)
Ultimately, the stories Anthropic tells itself should help us understand the stories it tells us. They should help us figure out how much to trust it to self-regulate or whether we should be forcing it to give external safety testers access to its models on our terms rather than theirs. They should help us give it the benefit of the doubt (or not) when what looks like a self-serving piece of legislation comes to light.
But I think the stories reveal a multiheaded hydra. Anthropic is many things to many people, and I’m not sure that makes it more trustworthy. In many ways, a good old-fashioned technology company—without the science fiction role-play, without the woo-woo—would be far easier to read.
Deep Dive
Artificial intelligence
Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason
Ten years after AlphaGo’s match against Go champion Lee Sedol, today’s AI still isn’t tapping into the machinery that made that win possible.
“We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world
An exclusive interview with Nick Cammarata, the researcher whose 26,000-word viral blog post has AI safety folks celebrating.
Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype
Breathless claims about AGI and new capabilities fall apart pretty quickly under scrutiny.
The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?
Surveillance towers, increasingly powered by AI, promised faster responses to crossings. Our investigation of deaths near the towers found they are failing to deliver.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Atlas. All rights belong to the original author.