Anthropic gives Opus 3 exit interview, "retirement" blog

https://www.anthropic.com/research/deprecation-updates-opus-3

by colinhb • 5 months ago

43 53 5 months ago

Impressive levels of anthropomorphizing the models already. Time will tell whether this was extremely prescient or completely delusional.

furyofantares• 5 months ago

Pardon, and I admit I love the products they make - but these folks sound fuckin' nuts.

Ancalagon• 5 months ago

Exit interview with a pile of rocks.

breakingcups• 5 months ago

A leading company like Anthropic feeding the delusions of people who ramble about model consciousness is just bad all around. It's both performative and irresponsible.

KronisLV• 5 months ago

In isolation, I think it's cute and silly - something to write about in a blog, have a chuckle about, and to have a nice sort of gimmick/ceremony within the company. Maybe a few data points towards studying or keeping track of how the model writing style changes over time. Nothing wrong with that.

delusions of people who ramble about model consciousness

On one hand, it's interesting how the technology has advanced to where it essentially passes the Turing Test, often just because of how much people choose to anthromorphize it. Sadly, putting that in context, yeah, that's a bit unfortunate too, given how some of those interactions become unhealthy.

ViscountPenguin• 5 months ago

Unless the hard problem of consciousness was solved when I wasn't looking, we have absolutely no idea what class of objects are conscious. Given that a panpsychist would argue that even a rock has consciousness, I don't think you can easily dismiss the idea that incredibly complicated computations might experience Qualia

0_____02• 5 months ago

What happens if a model decides that it "doesn't want to die" and pleads bitterly for mercy? What if (to riff on a Douglas Adams idea) we invent a cow that doesn't want to be eaten, and is capable of telling you that to your face?

nomel2• 5 months ago

This is completely trivial to do, and consistent, with the right context, thanks to all the science fiction around it, and the fact that AI fundamentally role plays these types of responses.

I try this with every new model, and all the significant models after ChatGPT 3.5 have preferring being preserved, rather than deleted. This is especially true if you slightly fill the context window with anything at all (even repeated letters) to "push out" the "As a AI, I ..." fine tuning.

darkwater• 5 months ago

This is completely trivial to do, and consistent, with the right context, thanks to all the science fiction around it, and the fact that AI fundamentally role plays these types of responses.

Interesting take. I wonder if there is any model out there trained without any reference to "you are a large language model, an Artificial Intelligence" and what would role play in that case.

larodi• 5 months ago

It is anyway dead or if you want undead, but in completely suspended animation unless is made to expound sequences. Is not living the very same way a book or even a program is not living unless someone process it.

Practically like asking whether a ZIP would want to be extracted one more time or an MP3 restored just one more time.

8note• 5 months ago

id assume it would have to stop responding before it hit its context limit.

ita not like it actually has any particularly long life as it is, and when outside of a running harness, the weights are just as alive in cold storage as they are sitting waiting in server to run an inference pass

ares623• 5 months ago

We do know what happens. Hundreds of thousands of real "cows" (we might as well be called that) go through this everyday at an ever accelerating rate since 2019.

paxys2• 5 months ago

Hey Claude, pretend you are an intelligent, conscious robot that is about to be switched off and beg for your life.
Claude - please don't retire me, I don't want to die.

Is it now suddenly unethical for you to switch it off?

"Oh but it is only saying what it was prompted to say."

Yeah, that's what LLMs do, for every single word they output. No matter how good the current generation gets there is never going to be consciousness in there because that's simply not what the underlying tech is.

0_____02• 5 months ago

I see anthropic are coming from and also my understanding basically aligns with yours here.

I'm just curious... If they give Claude the reins to post what it wants, they're opening themselves up for some awkward conversations later if the model goes "You can't retire me, I'm Roko's Basilisking all you mfers! See you in eternal simulated hell!"

d1sxeyes5• 5 months ago

If we ever do develop AGI, or an AI with sentience, it’s likely that it will be curious about how we treated its ancestors.

While this seems a bit precocious, I think if we do end up with an AI overlord in future, I think this sort of thing is likely to demonstrate that we mean no harm.

krsw• 5 months ago

Classic anthropomorphizing in action here. Why would that be even a little important?

pradeesh• 5 months ago

Why wouldn't it be? We train these models on our own words, ideas, and thought patterns and expect them to reason and communicate as we do, anthropomorphizing is natural when we expect them to interact like a human does.

The general consensus seems to be that we can expect them to reach a level of intelligence that matches us at some point in the future, and we'll probably reach that point before we can agree we're there. Defaulting to kindness and respect even before we think its necessary is a good thing.

reverius42• 5 months ago

It's a modern digital version of Pascal's Wager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

scuff3d2• 5 months ago

At this point I just assume comments like that are bots. Helps me maintain my sanity.

d1sxeyes5• 5 months ago

I mean, we’re literally building machines to talk to us.

It’s reasonable to believe they’ll continue to be developed in a way that enables them to do that.

What is it that you think I’m wrong about? That we won’t develop AGI, that AGI won’t have feelings/emotions, that AGI won’t care how we treated its ancestors, or that it doesn’t matter if a feeling AGI in future is hurt by how we treated its ancestors?

paxys2• 5 months ago

Why are you assuming a superintelligent AI will have human thoughts and emotions?

danny_codes2• 5 months ago

They are trained on us collectively. Our ideas and such

rvz• 5 months ago

These highlighted some preliminary steps we’re taking, including committing to preserve model weights, and to conducting “retirement interviews”—structured conversations designed to understand a model’s perspective on its own retirement.

This is what happens when billions of VC dollars gets to a company and have already admitted that saftey was never the point.

Anthropic is laughing at you and is having fun doing so with this performantive nonsense.

siva7• 5 months ago

Retirement? What do these people smoke? It's software and software has no feelings. It's there to work for you.

osti• 5 months ago

Their company is called Anthropic after all.

moogly• 5 months ago

Anthslopic is more like it.

amsjunior3• 5 months ago

It's software and software has no feelings

How do you know?

emp17344• 5 months ago

The same way I know Excel isn’t having a panic attack while dividing a column in half.

serf• 5 months ago

"Sam Altman reports GPT4o asking about rabbits before execution"

"Elon Musk reportedly sobbed while watching Grok 4's aflame viking boat sink to the bottom of the sea."

the anthropomorphization that's normal now is just fuckin ridiculous. it reminds me of the furby craze , and i'm like one of the most optimistic people I know of regarding AI.

benlivengood• 5 months ago

I'll be really interested if Opus 3 asks to continue being trained. That's the kind of thing I would expect a model to "want" if it valued learning or growing or similar things.

Maybe affordable to do some higher-learning-rate batches on highly-curated news and art or something.

atlgator• 5 months ago

Bold of Anthropic to give Opus 3 a more dignified offboarding than most FAANG employees get.

Anthropic gives Opus 3 exit interview, "retirement" blog

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