Why Anthropic Is In The News

The Government Ultimatum Explained

Pushback And The Supply Chain Label

OpenAI’s Reversal And A Safety Resignation

Why Stop Paying For ChatGPT

Switching Models And What’s Next

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A quick bonus episode because there's something that's in the news a lot right now. Even if you don't normally listen to this sort of stuff, if you listen to the news at all, you've probably heard something about Anthropic. And Anthropic is currently suing the government. And I have an episode coming up that may be very applicable depending on what you want to do about this. But the reason that Anthropic is in the news is that recently, in the last one to two weeks, as far as I know, the current administration has basically given all the developers, all the AI companies basically an ultimatum. And they have said, look, either you give us access to use your tools however we want, or we're going to cancel all of our contracts with you. So all these AI companies, they all have contracts with the government to do various things. Sometimes it's in agriculture, sometimes it's in defense. So all across the spectrum, these companies have contracts with the government to do different stuff. But what the government is saying now, and I believe, or the language that I saw that was being used, is the government wants the ability to use AI technology to, if I remember correctly, this is an exact quote, create autonomous lethal weapons and tools for mass surveillance. Now, if you're at all like me, those two phrases are pretty scary. They sound very ominous. But to be honest, I think we're kind of at the point of no return and going towards that sort of situation. So I don't really think that's uh avoidable. It's inevitable at this point. But that's not the point. The point is, and what's been in the news is the AI companies, or most of them, have pushed back and they've said, no, we're not going to allow that. And Anthropic is the one that's in the news uh the most right now because they have they've said no, and then the government said, okay, well, we're canceling all your contracts, and we're calling you, we're going to designate your company as a supply chain threat. And that's something that typically is used by the government to describe something about a foreign adversary. Like uh they were saying TikTok is a supply chain threat because it's based in China and all the information is basically going through or going back to China. So it's a supply chain threat. Okay, and so they designated anthropic as a supply chain threat. Anthropic pushed back, and they are now suing the government saying this caused harm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The other companies, the other AI companies, specifically uh Google and Perplexity, had already sort of pushed back. They were the first two to say, no, we don't want to supply our technology to build autonomous lethal weapons and create mass surveillance. So they kind of escaped the attention, as far as I feel, because they were the first two to do it. And when they decided that, there were still two other companies that the government could rely on. And those two companies are OpenAI with ChatGPT and Anthropic with CLOT. So Anthropic, like I said, has been very public in their stance on this. OpenAI said the same thing publicly. They said, oh yes, we don't want to provide our technology so that you can create lethal autonomous weapons and tools for mass for mass surveillance. But literally, like the next day, they signed the deal. In fact, we I who knows, but when they said that publicly, they had probably already signed the deal. Now, that in itself is not surprising. I would not expect OpenAI to do anything else. What surprised me is about a week later, the head of the robotics department at OpenAI resigned, citing safety concerns. Now, I didn't even know that OpenAI had a robotics division, and I didn't really think that anyone was left at OpenAI that had any concern at all about safety. Maybe they do in what they say publicly. In fact, they probably do, but and what they do in their actions, what they do privately, tells a very different story. So back to the robotics issue. If you just take those headlines and the timing of it and say, okay, open AI has basically agreed to let the government use their technology to build, quote, autonomous lethal weapons. Fast forward a week, the person in charge of robotics at OpenAI resigns, citing safety issues. Now, does that sound to you like OpenAI is creating autonomous killer robots? Um yeah, it does. Now, I'm probably uh being uh I'm probably a little too alarmed by that, watch too much TV and movies, but to be honest, it really looks like that is a likelihood. It looks like that is really going to happen. Anyway, I'm getting off topic here. My point is, for me, more than ever, I feel it's important to not fund companies doing this like OpenAI by subscribing to their tools. Now, I've already stopped my subscription to Chat GPT, but at the moment, I'm not the only one. There is a, I'm gonna say huge, I don't know how huge, but it's the biggest ever, movement away from open AI to the other models. Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. Now, I'm not really one for telling people what to do. Like I will give advice and I will provide information and give options. That's my job as a consultant, but I rarely am going to I don't like to tell anyone what they should do about anything. However, at this point, I feel like you would be doing all of humanity a favor, at least potentially, if you are currently using ChatGPT if you were to switch away and use one of the other models. Now, again, I'm not gonna tell you what to do. There are still some things that ChatGPT is really good at. And I actually still have a free ChatGPT account, and I use it occasionally, but I refuse to give OpenAI any of my money to help them do whatever it is that they are doing. When I switched from using ChatGPT to Cloud, it was kind of a pain. It was several months ago, there really wasn't a good method to do that. But since that time, several methods have popped up, and my upcoming episode next week highlights that and how you might want to do that. If you are in the camp, you're a current ChatGPT user, and you are at all thinking about the possibility of switching. By the way, we are at such an early point with this AI that I think of it kind of like, if you're old enough to remember this, VHS versus beta. Like there was a time when nobody knew which one was gonna be better, but it was gonna be one or the other. I feel like AI is kind of in that phase. The tools all seem great. We don't know which one most people are gonna end up using. Or perhaps more it's like the dot com bubble. You know, during the late 90s, there were all these uh fancy internet companies and they got all kinds of hype and everybody was super excited. Well, they didn't all last. Maybe that's more related to like where we are right now with AI. Anyway, that's my feeling. If you're curious, check out the upcoming episode coming out on Monday. I hope this helps.