They sound exactly like George Bush and every other American leader who's claimed high minded ideals while they engage in interventions in direct contradiction to those ideals around the world
To be clear, I don't think anthropic is itself intervening.
The concerns they've raised about authoritarianism is "AI enabling authoritarians."
When they push back on the US government wanting to use Claude to (legally) surveil US citizens, that still feels consistent to me as a concern about authoritarianism.
I think it's reasonable to hear high minded ideals and become skeptical, but in this case I'm surprised that people are trying to accuse them of hypocrisy
It's not the same, LLM's are qualitatively different due to the stochastic and non-reproducible nature of their output. From the LLM's point of view, non-functional or incorrect code is exactly the same as correct code because it doesn't understand anything that it's generating. When a human does it, you can say they did a bad or good job, but there is a thought process and actual "intelligence" and reasoning that went into the decisions.
I think this insight was really the thing that made me understand the limitations of LLMs a lot better. Some people say when it produces things that are incorrect or fabricated it is "hallucinating", but the truth is that everything it produces is a hallucination, and the fact it's sometimes correct is incidental.
I'm not sure who generates random code without a goal or checking if it works afterwards. Smells like a straw man. Normally you set the rules, you know how to validate if the result works, and you may even generate tests that keep that state. If I got completely random results rather than what I expect, I wouldn't be using that system - but it's correct and helpful almost every time. What you describe is just not how people work with LLMs in practice.
Correct. The thing has no concept of true or false. 0 or 1.
Therefore it cannot necessarily discern between two statements that are practically identical in the eyes of humans. This doesnt make the technology useless but its clearly not some AGI nonsense.
Oh, well if it can generate some simple code for your personal website, surely it can also be the "next level of abstraction" for the entirety of software engineering.
Well, I don’t really think it’s “simple”. The code uses React, nodejs, realtime events pushed via SSE, infra pushed via Terraform, postgres, blob store on S3, emails send with SES… sure, it’s not the next Google, but it’s a bit above, like, a personal blog.
And in any case, you are moving goalposts. OP said he had never seen anyone serious claim that they got productivity gains from AI. When I claim that, you say “well it’s not the next level of abstraction for all SWE”. Obviously - I never claimed that?
If you want my opinion, I think LLMs can be pretty good at generating simple code for things you can find on stackoverflow and require minor adjustments. Even then, if you don't really understand the code you can have major issues.
Your site is case in point of why LLMs demo well but kind of fall apart in the real world. It's pretty good at fitting lego blocks together based on a ton of work other people have put into React and node or the SSE library you used, etc. But that's not what Karpathy is saying, he's saying "the hottest programming language is english".
That's bonkers. In my experience it can actually slow you down as much as speed you up, and when you try to do more complicated things it falls apart.
I use hickory a lot and have contributed to it. It does have a pretty robust async DNS implementation, and its helpfully split into multiple different crates so you can pick your entry point into the stack. For instance, it offers a recursive resolver, but you can also just import the protocol library and build your own with tokio.
I love Rust and async Rust, but it's not true that there aren't annoying things to deal with. Anyone who's written async Rust enough has run into cancel-safety issues, the lack of async Drop and the interaction of async and traits. It's still very good, but there are some issues that don't feel very rust-y.
That would be the case under market conditions where buyers are making rational decisions with perfect knowledge based on all available choices. Does that sound like the system we have? To me, reality seems more like a small set of oligopolies or effective monopolies, byzantine ownership structures and a pursuit of short term profits pushing future costs elsewhere as externalities.
I didn't say we get the quality of software people would rationally pay for in a rational system, if the right people were paying for it. I said we get the quality of software that people pay for.
To me on markets where customer actually gets to choose what to buy or play the weaker options have much less success. Gaming is really one example. There is still sales, but they are lot less than expected even from big players if they don't look like good products.
This. There are plenty of people trying to keep using Windows 10, and Microsoft is trying to force them to use Windows 11, which they do not want. The same goes for Mac OS 26. "Choice" doesn't matter.
It's the same here. Calling what the west has a "free-market capitalist" system is also a lie. At every level there is massive state intervention. Most discoveries come from publicly funded work going on at research universities or from billions pushed into the defense sector that has developed all the technology we use today from computers to the internet to all the technology in your phone. That's no more a free-market system than China is "communist" either.
I think the reality is just that governments use words and have an official ideology, but you have to ignore that and analyze their actions if you want to understand how they behave.
not to mention that most corporations in the US are owned by the public through the stock market and the arrangement of the American pension scheme, and public ownership of the means of production is one of the core tenets of communism. Every country on Earth is socialist and has been socialist for well over a century. Once you consider not just state investment in research, but centralized credit, tax-funded public infrastructure, etc. well yeah, terms such as "capitalism" become used in a totally meaningless way by most people lol.
I think you're confusing publicly available shares with actual ownership by the public in a way that's no consistent with the way any socialist would think about ownership. Stock may be available to anyone in the sense that anyone could buy shares, but actual ownership and decision-making is highly concentrated. Real public ownership would mean something quite different.
My thoughts on these ideologies lately have shifted to viewing them as "secular religions". There are many characteristics that line up with that perspective.
Both communist and capitalist purists tend to be enriched for atheists (speaking as an atheist myself). Maybe some of that is people who have fallen out with religion over superstitions and other primitivisms, and are looking to replace that with something else.
Like religions, the movements have their respective post-hoc anointed scriptural prophets: Marx for one and Smith for the other.. along with a host of lesser saints.
Like religions, they are very prescriptive and overarching and proclaim themselves to have a better connection with some greater, deeper underlying truth (in this case about human behaviour and how it organizes).
For analytical purposes there's probably still value in the underlying texts - a lot of Smith and Marx's observations about society and human behaviour are still very salient.
But these ideologies, the outgrowths from those early analytical works, seem utterly devoid of any value whatsoever. What is even the point of calling something capitalist or communist. It's a meaningless label.
These days I eschew that model entirely and try to keep to a more strict analytical understanding on a per-policy basis. Organized around certain principles, but eschewing ideology entirely. It just feels like a mental trap to do otherwise.
In your world where jobs become "optional" because a private company has decided to fire half their workforce, and the state also does not provide some kind of support, what do all the "optional" people do?
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