braydenm

Before Anthropic, I worked at Cruise for four years as it competed against Waymo. The culture rewarded (and demanded) moving quickly, trusting that the company could empirically discover the risks that the robot cars posed and iteratively solve them to keep up with the rate at which it was scaling out its technology. There was very little interest or appetite for coordinating or collaborating with other AV companies across the industry to create an externally vetted record of safety metrics, or to compare the safety of different brands, or learn from the advancements of other companies. Instead the focus went on racing to improve the capabilities and deploy quickly - a popular internal meme was the Michael Phelps vs le Clos photo showing overlaid with the Waymo/Cruise logos. It was when the two companies were neck-and-neck that I felt the most pressure to find ways to ship despite the risk, when time for deep analysis became more limited and communication lines to leadership became most stretched. It was disappointing to see one of these blind spots result in the Cruise incident and the loss of trust that ultimately sank our company’s efforts.

In that instance I was grateful the downside was limited to a single injury. It’s clear that future AI technology will have more monumental potential impacts. I really don’t want to be in a situation where leading labs, or competing nations, create the same race dynamic that prevents us from taking the appropriate level of caution. AI minds are a significantly more complex thing to understand than the software stack of an autonomous vehicle, and yet we are leaving ourselves less time to get this right.

I joined Anthropic at the end of 2022 and I share the concerns that many of my colleagues have recently chosen to state publicly about the potential for future technology to pose existential risk to all of humanity. If we don’t find a way collectively as an industry to pace ourselves, then within two years the concerns we will be dealing with on a day-to-day basis will pose much larger downside risk than anything else we’ve seen from technology to date. I’m grateful that Dario has put his perspective out publicly and hope that this inspires other voluntary action and tops down coordination.

It’s a beautiful Saturday morning with my family here in the East Bay. While I hope we have many more years, I don’t know how many more Saturdays I’ll be able to play outside with my kids in the sunshine so I’m going to make the most of the time we have.

Relevant snippet:

> Can I use AI to get on the global leaderboard? Please don't use AI / LLMs (like GPT) to automatically solve a day's puzzles until that day's global leaderboards are full. By "automatically", I mean using AI to do most or all of the puzzle solving, like handing the puzzle text directly to an LLM. The leaderboards are for human competitors; if you want to compare the speed of your AI solver with others, please do so elsewhere. (If you want to use AI to help you solve puzzles, I can't really stop you, but I feel like it's harder to get better at programming if you ask an AI to do the programming for you.)

It's unclear what model was used for the outputs mentioned in the article, but here's the short story that Claude gave me for the same prompt: --- Here is a dystopian short story in the style of Margaret Atwood set in Canada:

The Snows Came Early That Year

The snows came early that year, blanketing the prairies in white before the harvest was complete. I awoke to howling winds rattling the panes of my solitary cabin, the radio readout blinking ominously, batteries too weak to check the weather reports again. I shuffled outside in layers of wool and coveralls, squinting against the icy gusts, to find the chicken coop door ripped clean off. Feathers and blood painted the snow crimson. The four hens I had left were gone, with only scattered tracks and droplets leading into the tree line to indicate the predator's escape.

I cursed under my frosted breath, the bitter wind stealing away my words. Food had already been scarce, each winter harder than the one before. I shuttered the coop and turned back inside just as the power flickered and went out. Now there was no heat, no light, no way to cook. The solar panels would be useless under the heavy snows.

As I sat wrapped in furs, watching my breath turn to plumes of smoke in the gloom, I made a plan to walk to town when the blizzard passed. Perhaps barter some handicrafts for a few days of rations. The trek would be risky, but staying here held a different kind of peril. The food stocks in my locked pantry were dangerously low. There was no choice but to go.

The Katskil wolves would likely be on the prowl, their numbers multiplying as the animal population declined. Stay to the road, move quick, keep head down. Don't attract attention. Don't look too frail, too thin, too cold. The robotic guards at the checkpoints would be indifferent to my starvation, but opportunistic thieves might not. This was the world we inhabited now. Hold fast to what is yours. Trust no one. Every day another fight to survive. My grandmother's voice echoed in my mind...from her days before the collapse: "Don't lose hope, girl. It's always darkest before the dawn." But that was in another era, now lost to us. There were no more dawns ahead, only the howling dark.

Is there any word on whether the modem has moved to a different supplier? I previously suffered challenges having to soft-reset Pixel 6/7 to "Fix Connectivity" fairly frequently.

Amazon Bedrock makes Claude 2 available, as well as some other models.

Given recent discussion on what super intelligent machines might mean and whether they're even possible in the first place I thought I'd link to this hyperbolic throwback that is still relevant even as the broader discourse starts to think more seriously about this topic 5 years later.

NON-LINEAR STORYTELLING December 2014 (30 hours) > In winter of 2014, I applied for a job in the Creative Department at Wizards of the Coast, working on storylines for the Magic: The Gathering trading card game. This was a supplemental piece submitted with my application, meant to demonstrate creativity, world-building, and outside-the-box-thinking.