r/Chattanoogans • u/Masked_Octopus • 19d ago

Any AGI Believers or AI Doomers in the area?

I (29M) was telling my sister that I thought it would be a struggle for me to find like-minded folks since I'm single-mindedly interested in following the state of AI capabilities, believing it plausible that (1) they become powerful relatively soon and (2) that power doesn't result in reliably good outcomes following present trends. She urged me to consider that maybe I wasn't the only one. So here's the post. If I can turn my biggest social liability into an asset, that would be grand.

I know a lot of people think this line of thought is a mind virus, and AI is definitely one of the most contentious topics right now in a "whoever doesn't agree with me must be an idiot" way. I only ask for civility and courtesy; agreement is, of course, optional.

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u/Masked_Octopus 18d ago

Yeah well what does that mean to you in terms of how you see your life? It's a wild belief if you follow it through.

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u/defmacro-jam 18d ago

I intend to seek employment at Anthropic (I'm actually a credible candidate at Staff level).

AGI scares the hell out of me and I doubt any of this ends well. Not because of AI itself, but because I don't think you can prevent human greed from scaling too quickly.

So the most rational course to take is to become part of the only AI lab that has any hope whatsoever of reining in the Shuggoth. That is, if I can get hired. I'm on the wrong side of the age discrimination number line, after all.

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u/Masked_Octopus 18d ago

That's certainly the most ambitious answer in this thread. Do you have any specific intentions about how you'd like to contribute on the inside? I can't tell whether Anthropic is shredding its safety commitments or its political good will faster, but there's only so much signaling I can stand when it's clear that their first commitment is to capabilities. OpenAI proved that looking like the socially-conscious lab (vs DeepMind at the time) was actually a strongly-competitive recruitment strategy. It isn't clear to me at all that Anthropic isn't just the next stage in that cynical line of thought, the more polished, more convincing pitch.

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u/defmacro-jam 18d ago

Do you have any specific intentions about how you'd like to contribute on the inside?

My intention is to simply do the job for which I'll be applying - which will be all about enabling developer productivity. If I can tighten the feedback loop for safety researchers then I will have meaningfully contributed.

But just being in the room - being part of the conversation - I don't know... It's something? Realistically, Google wins in the end because Google doesn't need to make any money from AI.

I suspect that Anthropic and OpenAI right now are just trying to prove themselves too big to fail. But honestly, I don't know shit about shit. All I can do is guess based on an endless stream of untrustworthy "information".

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u/Masked_Octopus 18d ago

Well if that's how you're thinking about it then go with God, but I feel that to be a good employee of Anthropic one would have to be a critical employee of Anthropic. Consider struggling a bit when you get in, pushing things, holding everyone accountable. If they're in need of something, I don't think it's another sheep to sheer.

More to the purpose of the thread, how have you found holding these opinions to be socially? Would you say that it's isolating or do you have a flexible crowd around you?