Thanks for sharing. I missed your tweet calling him a sellout at the time. Looking at it now I see that you didn't respond to the replies. Have you said more about why you think he's a sellout elsewhere?
Personally I think it was *probably* a bad decision for him to join Anthropic (and think the same of Holden Karnofsky's decision to join--I couldn't make sense of his reasons despite his 4.5-hour 80,000 Hours Podcast interview), but I remain not fully confident.
Holden was only officially joining Anthropic after having been a major architect behind it from the beginning. It was too outrageous for Holden to continue running a supposedly independent org (Open Phil) for the benefit of another company (Anthropic).
Anthropic is building ASI. Joe is going to help them. He writes a novel explaining why what Anthropic is doing is wrong, then does it anyway. He seems to want to be doing stuff that feels really cutting edge, like Amanda Askell, and can’t resist joining the team even if he feels the need to disclaim his actions at length. In a few places the post seems to be admitting that he’s letting FOMO get the better of him when maybe the most virtuous thing to do would be to refuse to join Anthropic. He sold out.
Thanks for sharing. I missed your tweet calling him a sellout at the time. Looking at it now I see that you didn't respond to the replies. Have you said more about why you think he's a sellout elsewhere?
Personally I think it was *probably* a bad decision for him to join Anthropic (and think the same of Holden Karnofsky's decision to join--I couldn't make sense of his reasons despite his 4.5-hour 80,000 Hours Podcast interview), but I remain not fully confident.
I'm bothered by Joe Carlsmith not answering my question about why he didn't sign the Statement on Superintelligence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3ucdmfGKMGPcibmF6/leaving-open-philanthropy-going-to-anthropic?commentId=FeiSqARqHs7ABqdoA).
Holden was only officially joining Anthropic after having been a major architect behind it from the beginning. It was too outrageous for Holden to continue running a supposedly independent org (Open Phil) for the benefit of another company (Anthropic).
Anthropic is building ASI. Joe is going to help them. He writes a novel explaining why what Anthropic is doing is wrong, then does it anyway. He seems to want to be doing stuff that feels really cutting edge, like Amanda Askell, and can’t resist joining the team even if he feels the need to disclaim his actions at length. In a few places the post seems to be admitting that he’s letting FOMO get the better of him when maybe the most virtuous thing to do would be to refuse to join Anthropic. He sold out.