Why the Best AI Researchers Are Choosing Anthropic

There's this thesis, or narrative I should say, that perhaps Andrej and Anthropic are just positioning safety as a brand to win the hearts and minds, and then they're trying to do fearmongering for regulatory capture so they could become a monopoly and then eventually like ice out the open source models from contention in these enterprise deals. That's kind of how I'm seeing it. What do you think of that take? Like, do you think their moves can be like that? They're sort of the darling of the public right now. That's kind of like very other side of the spectrum take on Anthropic is actually evil as fuck and they're trying to be white knights to then go in and Trojan horse a bitch. You know what I mean?

I don't know if I fully agree with, but I like Ben Thompson's take on this aspect of Anthropic where he says they have brilliant leadership that can pull you into a reality distortion field. And actually, this is in the summary paragraph here where he compares the leadership of Anthropic to the leadership of Apple, where they have a company whose purpose is to make money, but they get the employees bought into something that they're acting in a way to make a better world. And this is actually not typical of a company. Like, not every company has this. And he says one of the ways that, like, OpenAI is misaligned is that they accidentally became a consumer tech company and they sort of lost this narrative of like, oh, we're building the god to rule over the world. This is our purpose in life. And, you know, they're thinking about advertising to consumers and stuff like this. It creates a little bit of a different tempo and culture. What Ben Thompson says in all of this is that that culture creates this mindset that because they're doing something better for the world, it's ideologically better. They're not just making money, they're making money in addition to being ideologically the best company in the world, that they have the feeling that they're the only people that should be making AI. That's Thompson's take, is that like it should be crystal clear to everybody now that Anthropic, the entire company, feels like nobody else should be making foundational AI, just them.

I see his point too. And zooming out, how do you win in business? You get the best talent. And how do you get the best talent? You inspire them with the vision and it seems possible, it aligns with where they want to go with the world, the changes they want to see in the world, and that they can have direct impact to bringing about that change. That's like a drug for highly capable people is like impact, right? And then there's capital. What you're essentially saying is OpenAI became this accidental consumer tech company. So they sort of lost that, hey, we're bleeding edge bringing about this machine god AI thing that has the impact. The impact is like we're making Sora videos for— that's not what the smartest AI researchers got into their PhD programs for, is to go make dumb meme videos. For consumers. And Anthropic's whole position from the get-go has been, we're going to bring AI into the world safely. I think that actually behooves them. It gets them the talent from the ideological lens. The same people that would share that philosophy, people that are like top of their field, AI researchers, ML researchers, I'm sure it appeals to their ego in some way to go shape a large part of humanity and get their names down in terms of legacy. Like, I definitely see that. And it works for them. They get the best talent. Like, then they're winning. Like, clearly. I just hope that those nerds are also reading philosophy and trying to understand morals and ethics and, and the humanities as well, and not losing their own humanity. That's all I'll say.