Anthropic Gifts a Feeling of Safety: Insecurity Blooms This Holiday Season
December 25, 2024
Written by a dinobaby, not an over-achieving, unexplainable AI system.
TechCrunch published “Google Is Using Anthropic’s Claude to Improve Its Gemini AI.” The write up reports:
Contractors working to improve Google’s Gemini AI are comparing its answers against outputs produced by Anthropic’s competitor model Claude, according to internal correspondence seen by TechCrunch. Google would not say, when reached by TechCrunch for comment, if it had obtained permission for its use of Claude in testing against Gemini.
Beyond Search notes Pymnts.com report from February 5, 2023, that Google invested at that time $300 million in Anthropic. Beyond Search recalls a presentation at a law enforcement conference. One comment made by an attendee to me suggested that Google was well aware of Anthropic’s so-called constitutional AI. I am immune to AI and crypto babble, but I did chase down “constitutional AI” because the image the bound phrase sparked in my mind was that of the mess my French bulldog delivers when he has eaten spicy food.
The illustration comes from You.com. Kwanzaa was the magic word. Good enough.
The explanation consumes 34 pages of an ArXiv paper called “Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback.” The paper has more than 48 authors. (Headhunters, please, take note when you need to recruit AI wizards.) I read the paper, and I think — please, note, “think” — the main idea is:
Humans provides some input. Then the Anthropic system figures out how to achieve helpfulness and instruction-following without human feedback. And the “constitution”? Those are the human-created rules necessary to get the smart software rolling along. Presumably Anthropic’s algorithms ride without training wheels forevermore.
The CAI acronym has not caught on like the snappier RAG or “retrieval augmented generation” or the most spectacular jargon “synthetic data.” But obviously Google understands and values to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, staff time, and the attention of big Googler thinkers like Jeff Dean (who once was the Big Dog of AI) but has given way to the alpha dog at DeepMind).
The swizzle for this “testing” or whatever the Googlers are doing is “safety.” I know that when I ask for an image like “a high school teacher at the greenboard talking to students who are immersed in their mobile phones”, I am informed that the image is not safe. I assume Anthropic will make such crazy prohibitions slightly less incomprehensible. Well, maybe, maybe not.
Several observations are warranted:
- Google’s investment in Anthropic took place shortly after the Microsoft AI marketing coup in 2023. Perhaps someone knew that Google’s “we invented it” transformer technology was becoming a bit of a problem
- Despite the Google “we are the bestest” in AI technology, the company continues to feel the need to prove that it is the bestest. That’s good. Self- knowledge and defeating “not invented here” malaise are positives.
- DeepMind itself — although identified as the go-to place for the most bestest AI technology — may not be perceived as the outfit with the Holy Grail, the secret to eternal life, and the owner of most of the land on which the Seven Cities of Cibola are erected.
Net net: Lots of authors, Google testing itself, and a bit of Google’s inferiority complex — Quite a Kwanzaa gift.
Stephen E Arnold, December 25, 2024
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