Every bubble goes through this phase just before it pops. Pre-implosion Twitter had tons of folks doing useless “research” projects, WeWork had folks studying furniture design’s impact on wellbeing, and so on.
When you’re more worried about this sort of stuff vs generating profit then the history books strongly indicate that’s usually not a good omen of what’s coming next.
Anthropic has been going through the phase of doing this particular useless research project the entire time. The stated impetus for their founding is that OpenAI, which has also been doing this research the entire time, wasn't doing it enough. This shouldn't tell you anything about whether a bubble is about to pop.
AI safety in the context of the frontier labs is completely a joke, much like privacy to the previous iteration of big tech. They talk about safety but end up just releasing the next more powerful model. They only talk about “scaling back” when the models aren’t getting better to protect their valuations.
cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
When you’re more worried about this sort of stuff vs generating profit then the history books strongly indicate that’s usually not a good omen of what’s coming next.
ToValueFunfetti · · focus · HN ↗
solenoid0937 · · focus · HN ↗
zombot · · focus · HN ↗
mlazos · · focus · HN ↗