One of the things that Altman does great is that when he writes he writes as though it will be read by the public every time. It’s why he is able to constantly post his own internal memos/posts on twitter. It’s great too because it makes him look “transparent”.
I think this is one of the weaknesses of rationalism and effective altruism, is that it tries to make a clean break from the common law legal reasoning that the government, and thus corporations, operate on. While I find rationalism to be a useful lens, the fact is that the common law legal framework is totally dominant, and so these deontological arguments made rationally collapse very quickly when translated to the dominant framework.
To be fair, common law and the current system are totally fucking dumb. Everyone that has come up with it and perpetuates it should be ashamed of themselves.
As much as Trump and Hegseth would like it to be called the Department of War, it still takes an act of Congress to change the name of the Department of Defense. No reason to call it by anything else until that happens.
Departament of defense sounds like a newspeak for a country that was not in any danger of being invaded for a century or more and all the wars abroad it participated in, it entered pretty much by choice. Department of war is way more accurate.
This is such a foot stomping childish thing to get caught up on. It does not at all matter what a dept is called. Try to get over the extremely superficial.
Its incredibly simple - they want to get off the supply chain risk list.
Its very evident in his statement, he's trying very hard to clarify what that list means for corporations and downstream business with large commercial and strategic companies.
Imagine if Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc decided that they don't want to ANY sort of minuscule risk (real or perceived) to their massive public sector business lines (via all their DoD DoJ NHS and other 3 letter agencies, state agencies, city and local municipals etc) - and decide to cancel their enterprise Anthropic licenses - which is a VERY possible scenario.
And these are the big players, theres a whole slew of medium and small players all with existing government contracts that need to tread carefully.
Not everything has to be a conspiracy or some 4D chess business move. Dario is a morally motivated person and regretted the tone that was being conveyed in that memo, so he apologized.
Yeah, that's completely unbelievable. You don't just accidentally call Trump a "dictator" or go on an extended tirade about Sam Altman. Clearly, he was speaking how he truly felt and how he's doing damage control.
