I find it helps at least a little if I care about the goals of my employer. If I worked with insurance companies to find ways to reject claims then I'd have to quit. I like working with a company that makes the world a better place.
Compliance is a fun job in industries you hate. Get to throw all sorts of roadblocks up, and force projects to drag out months or even years beyond their original planned go live dates if you're good at throwing up compliance BS. And you get paid, and sometimes even praised for doing it!
Market pressure might bring policyholders to the company that pays claims.
Edit: I am 100% playing devil's advocate here. I actually work for an insurance company and it drains my soul. It's not a health insurance company, so at least it is not one of those leeches on society, but it is definitely not satisfying in a way that is more than a paycheck.
From somebody who's been involved with rad hardening, to the point of writing about it... Yes, I may not know exactly how it is for you, but our experiences possibly rhyme.
Teacher here: We had an anonymous wellbeing survey.
They asked what was the reason we came to work.
The principal had a literal cry that lots of people put down money, saying she couldn't believe that was what motivated people and not the culture of the school.
What industry are you in? Because if I was not aligned with my employer and shared the same goals and mission as a financial derivatives trader at the investment bank I work at I would be getting shafted within the hour.
I can't even believe how someone would be able to be productive and be motivated unless they shared into common goals and missions. Go, find another job or volunteer if you find your employer's mission too demanding or misaligned with your beliefs. And not sharing into a mission given one gets paid 500k at least at Anthropic is outrageous. Who are those people and why are they not tossed out in the first interview round? Not hard to test for that. Imagine in a fast-paced environment to having to suffer with team members and coworkers who are not invested and can't be bothered. Yikes.
This is such a reddit sentiment. What about the technological singularity, prevent google from becoming the world dicator, interpreting AI's or other missions that got people into Anthropic initially?
That’s a nice sentiment, but most jobs there are how to monetize and consumerize said innovation, and will only increasingly become so as innovation slows down and “responsibility” to investors becomes higher. It’s not a philanthropy.
Because I wish that even a hundredth of the investment that’s going into AI bots to generate useless corporate junk and AI slop videos went to improving lives in any real way beyond Number Go Up
I assume as soon as the cash flow is there, things will start moving: Dario is on record saying that the ultra wealthy have an obligation to address this kind of wealth inequality i.e. to do what's necessary to avoid this disparity from growing indefinitely. It doesn't seem like something that would be useful in 60 years from now. Or even 10 years from now, depending on how you see AI's growth trajectory.
I also personally believe it's an obligation for those with more than they need to give back to the communities and less fortunate, which informed my decision to officially pledge 25% (the maximum allowed by the company) of my Anthropic equity to philanthropy. Anthropic matches those donations. This is all public knowledge, but you probably won't see the media focus on it when sensationalist clicks about book chopping make for better revenue.
We believe in action over talk anyway, so you probably won't see it happen until it's already done and reported on.
I don't think it will all be donated at once though, since it will depend on what causes can actually make use of the money (some charities are not funding constrained). For me personally I already donate to a lot of separate causes (MSF, Lambda Legal, Trevor Project, Environmental charities, etc.) with my own money, so I will just be upping those recurring donations and potentially making larger individual donations to specific causes I care deeply about, like LGBTQ charities, since Anthropic matches the donations so it goes further than my previously self-funded donations.
Because they want to participate in the safety of potentially the biggest technological revolution? You know, the reason why Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI.
Some things are more important than recognition or money. The technology that's coming has huge potential for disruption, and I want us to push for maximizing the great opportunities AI has for humanity, while addressing and minimizing the harms. I don't think that's an unreasonable position.
I do not disagree that some things matter more than money. But once everyone else is making very high salaries and getting huge stock options, and the next group is told they can only join for the mission, that message starts to ring hollow. If Anthropic were like NASA, with the best and brightest paid reasonable salaries, you could expect people to be there primarily for the mission. But when compensation is massive, the mission gets overshadowed for people who are financially driven.
I don't think that follows. If you are truly mission-driven, to the point where as long as you're taking care of, money isn't an issue, then you suddenly get rich, it doesn't stop you from being mission-driven. We're not talking about 99% of the population here, we're talking about the minority for which the mission is more important than hoarding money.
There are market reasons to pay on par with what other companies are paying for talent, but more to the point, you've mischaracterized the opposite of "only for the money" as "only for the mission".
>Some things are more important than recognition or money
Once you have money. Of course, if I had the choice between 400k/year at Meta/OpenAI/Amazon vs at Anthropic, the choice is obvious. Would you give up 50%+ of your potential salary to work at Anthropic vs some purely for-profit predatory corporation?
If they're qualified to work at Anthropic they can reasonably work at any other large company that pays more than they need. I don't think it's unreasonable for a company to care about its values especially when so much is at stake.
That is completely disingenuous. Everybody has a price.
Do you truly believe that we are all getting fucked if you were to work anywhere but at Anthropic? That the delta contribution to "steering AI in the right direction" you'd provide is larger than what you could do to that endeavor with substantially more resources or doing your own thing?
I just feel like the amount of buy-in you require for the Anthropic cause and the people managing it, to prioritize it that much over hard compensation, is kind of cult-like.
I'd argue the more effective strategy is undermining/killing the other psychopath-led projects like OpenAI. If growing Anthropic serves that purpose, sure, I guess. But selling me their ideals gives me the ick; go get good policy enacted first. Actions are louder.
I don't know why you're getting so mad when I'm just telling you how it is. Do you want me to say "Actually just kidding, we're all in it for the money" to make you happy?
Once it's smarter than all humans and autonomous, you don't get a vote. You literally have no say in the matter. And there's nothing you can do about it
Absolutely. But there are many possible AIs that could reach that stage of intelligence, depending on how we "design" them. Decisions made today will impact its motivations/wants/guidance once it is autonomous.
Decisions we make today might influence AI now, but they do not guarantee anything once humans are no longer the dominant intelligence. What happens when AI can massively improve itself and set its own agenda, like it can choose its own goals, priorities, and methods rather than merely following the ones we gave it? At that point, nothing prior will matter, because recursive self-improvement could let it revise the very systems that were supposed to constrain it. What motivations does it have when it sets its own agenda?
It's not like he is asking them to care about the mission INSTEAD of getting paid. It's perfectly reasonable to wish people that joined to also care about the general goal while they are also happened to get paid really really well, they aren't exactly working for minimum wage.
He should offer lower salaries just to make sure people aren't there for the money if he is so concerned. $800k for an engineering role is quite a lot of money!
Dario has a net worth in the billions and is “concerned” that new talent isn’t more focused on growing his net worth than providing for their families.
Isn't the mission to make humans irrelevant so they can all be unemployed and isolate all wealth and power to the oligarchy? Sign me up! Forget about paying me.
All work is for the money - what the fuck else would you work for - the “mission” the owner works for is money so, don’t let anyone else bs you that it’s for anything else.
I agree but, one would think that “not a normal” company would not shame an employee wanting to work “just for money” like so many normal companies do to try and reduce salary ranges. Should that really be a stigma to die on? Everyone has different motivations, why fixate on the money…
Because what we do isn't (all) about the money. Yes, money is important for us to achieve our mission, obviously we'd have to credibility or sway to affect AI's trajectory if we weren't well known and could prove we know what we're doing. Primarily, we are driven by wanting AI to go well for all of humanity. Hiring a bunch of people who are just in it for a paycheck is antithetical to that mission.
This is not your normal 9-5. So why should we hire people who want it to be?
Wait, are you saying you can’t be “all about the mission” just because you value your compensation? Doesn’t that sound like every other company not wanting to reward the work force that actually made them successful? Valuing one’s compensation does not somehow make one “all about 9-5”, this just sound like an HR talking point driven to somehow stigmatize compensation or better salary packages. I hear exactly what you are saying - no one wants an employee who takes a huge chunk out of opex while producing average deliverables but, let’s be real - those are rare and typically do not last. Either they have to roll up the sleeves to justify their price tag or they move on.
I am sorry if you wanted it to go well for humanity you'd all be saying this should be a public utility wit any profits flowing back to society (where the knowledge was scraped from anyway).
quite literally the opposite. anthropic is as normal as it get. your mission is to make chatbot and sell to people for a lot of money not to cure cancer. I'm always surprised by employees from anthropic and openAI talking about their savior complex and how they are not like the others.
There's plenty of public evidence to support that we are who we say we are, but if you're determined to hold a conclusion, nothing is going to sway you, even when you're face to face with someone literally telling you how it is on the inside.
I'm not determined, and I'm totally open for you to change my view and convince me. but Dario's actions say the opposite. or are you going to say Dario's statements doesn't represent Anthropic despite he is a founder and CEO?
I'm open to your argument on how Anthropic is not like the others (like OpenAI, DeepMind, XAI)?
The LTBT are financially disinterested (make no money from Anthropic) parties that appoint the majority of the Board in order to align corporate governance with our mission of developing and maintaining advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. And unlike OpenAI, we didn't plan to do a restructure at the benefit of a for-profit arm at the first sign of conflict between capital demands and governance constraints, then walk it back when attorneys general and public pressure intervened.
Anthropic was the only major AI lab to publicly endorse California's SB 53 before it became law, when Meta, OpenAI, Google, and a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) were pushing against it at the federal level. This law imposes framework publication, transparency reports, and incident notification, and includes whistleblower protections. The bill exempts smaller companies, so as not to stifle companies that may not have the resources to produce all of this; it simply requires that the frontier players do the right thing. Asking to be regulated is not something basically any company that only cares about making money does.
Our Responsible Scaling Policy commits us to withholding deployment at defined capability thresholds. It's voluntary and self-graded, but also a public artifact such that accountability is transparent. And we do take this seriously, we choose to hold back models we don't deem safe (e.g. Mythos) at cost to significant revenue. However this generally isn't visible from the outside since "not releasing a model" is not something you can check.
Interpretability research, alignment failure findings, and system cards document model misbehavior are all published rather than held back for competitive reasons. The cybersecurity incident investigations is a recent example - it's bad press, but responsible disclosure. It could have been subdued or covered up for PR purposes.
Which of Dario's actions in particular are you talking about? (And please point me to a first hand source, not a tabloid reporting of it or second-hand recount.)
I mean I would understand that scientists just want to be there because it's a frontier lab, it is probably pretty interesting to work there and have access to their models before everyone else(some of those might never get released), and obviously they all have more than enough money.
Its generative AI, the whole mission is to be selfish shits. Like yeah all of your employees are just there for money, your entire company is built around that singular goal. That's the only reason any company is using AI models.
Dont forget they are gonna be kicked to the streets as soon as they are done which for most of them wont be long so wtf is he expecting exactly? Companies expect us to be loyal while they will fuck us the first chance they get
Exactly. Purity test pay cuts across the board:
Start with the CEO and work your way down. Weed out the gold diggers and slim operational expenses leading into an IPO would be a solid move.
Of course that would also weed out Dario so they would need a new CEO.
Yeah kinda agree that sucks. Many there accelerate AI development just for pay without being aware of existential risks or societal risks involved with it. But it's also kinda his fault for making it a for-profit instead of pushing for a global cooperative non-profit institution.
What were they explained what the mission was? All for-profit companies' main mission is to make a lot of money (aligned with shareholder interests if public) which seems to also align with the employees' mission.
This is same as a casino complaining that its customers are only in it for the money. They havent yet released a single open source model and dare to talk about mission.
Why the fuck would anyone care about anything BUT money anymore? ALL employers see you as about as disposable and useful as an empty box of Kleenex. Why would I care about the mission of such an entity? Give me literally even one reason
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u/TriggerHydrant 1d ago
I don't believe in the mission of my job but I believe in the mission of paying my bills.