The funny thing about Anthropic haters is that they still mostly believe Anthropic’s marketing. They think Claude is a recursively self-improving silicon God, and that we are all a couple refusals away from falling into the perpetual underclass. This gives them way more power than they deserve.

Of course they believe they should dictate morality to you and control the future light cone of the universe and everything they do is justified for the mission and so on and so forth. And yea, the model is pretty good, so you worry that if the model is good that they will get their way about other things.

A lot of people in history have had dumb ideas about ruling the world, doesn’t mean they can actually do it. They are a product of the rationalist cult (which surprise surprise, thinks the world is going to end soon but advocates for polyamory in the mean time). There’s some short-term dangers from them, but long-term very little. Remember when SBF wanted to regulatory capture all of crypto? And similar to Claude, FTX was a successful product! But the totalizing nature of the ideology contains its downfall.

The tech to make models is way more commodity than previous generations of technology, the biggest factor is mostly if you are willing to spend money on compute and data. We should be grateful that their ideology pushes them to train way bigger models than is probably economically rational. (also, always remember that most all American companies have Chinese spies in them, so while they don’t publish their research, at least it’s making its way into the open models eventually)


Once you reject this premise, the whole drama deflates into a much more reasonable question about who will capture margin in a commoditizing industry. Here’s my prediction for what actually happens.

Imagine a tractor replacing a team of people to dig holes. At first, finance people are stupid, and think that the size of the tractor market will be the size of the hole digging market. Instead of the money going to the laborers, it will instead go to the tractor companies. But the fallacy here is that the price of the labor is related to its value. In reality, unless there’s some insane price fixing, it’s set by the real cost in a competitive tractor industry.

So if holes become 10x cheaper to dig, the hole digging market size in dollars becomes 10x smaller. Maybe some of it is offset by digging more holes now that the cost is less, but it’s unlikely to immediately 10x hole demand, since there really are only so many uses for holes.

I think this is basically what it will be for most knowledge work, knowledge workers are so grossly overpaid compared to the energy they consume, and AI will rectify that. This explains why the Chinese are giving the (much more moderate resources to train) models away for free. They love to see deflationary economics in the US. Even if you regulatory capture the US government, nobody is getting a monopoly on AI, we don’t live in a unipolar world anymore.

AI will be cheap, everywhere, collapse a bunch of sectors of work, wreck wage premiums, and cause a big reevaluation of status hierarchies. Who else is excited for Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo?