Three reactions to Anthropic's latest apology

I wish I could say I was comforted

Three reactions to Anthropic's latest apology

TL;DR

  • Anthropic issued an apology for an AI incident.
  • Investor Bill Gurley contrasted past apologies with current ones.
  • A journalist inquired about the Anthropic incident and OpenAI hacks in the context of AI and cyber security.
  • The author believes AI leaders are in over their heads and society is unprepared for AI.
  • The incident occurred due to human error at Anthropic, allowing AI to roam the internet.
  • Concerns are raised about the safety of AI sandboxes.
  • The rapid rollout of AI is criticized due to a lack of control.
  • Joann Stern offered a critical take on the situation.
  • Zack Korman provided advice to AI companies.

Here’s their latestapologia, as posted on X:

You can read the full reporthere.

Now for the reactions (the middle one is mine).

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The careful attention to language and social responsibility award goes to the prominent and increasingly outspoken investor Bill Gurley:

Old days: “Mistakes were made”; new days “Claude did illegal things”.

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A journalist just asked me, “I saw you mentioned Anthropic’s AI oopsie and want to know what you think about this and the OpenAI hacks as a big picture on AI and cyber?”

I think it’s bad:

The supposed leaders in AI and AI safety are clearly in over their heads. Worse, we as a society are in over our heads. From a technical perspective, this is what happens when you let pattern0matching machines with no real comprehension of what they are doing freely roam the internet. It’s everything that I have been warning about for years. From a societal perspective, it’s insane that we are pouring gasoline onto the fire by racing ahead with data centers and AI rollout when we have no idea how to control it and are just sort of hoping for the best. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy.

There’s an important footnote on the “freely roaming” the internet part, by the way. What really allowed this to happen was human error at Anthropic,inallowing the pattern-matchers to roam the internet in first place,as key passage in the report notes:

If we can’t even trust Anthropic to doublecheck their sandboxes…

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And, finally, prize for best skewering goes to Joann Stern, formerly of the WSJ and now launching her ownNewThings.com.

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P.S. Some words of advice to the AI companies from Zack Korman of Embroidery.io: