OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, already embroiled in fights with Apple and Elon Musk, is now sparring with Anthropic.
On Thursday, Anthropic posted a video on Claude’s X account. The video was a collage of random pictures with voiceovers asking existential questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “If it ends up taking like almost all the jobs, then what does it mean to work?”
The video, captioned “There is hope in hard questions,” was part of Anthropic’s new social initiative: “Inviting hard questions.”
According to Anthropic, the initiative aims to answer people’s most pressing concerns about AI. The company will “report the specific actions we’re taking to address those questions,” and be clear on where it might fall short of its goals, per its press release.
“I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something,” Altman wrote in his repost of Claude’s X post.
“Hard questions are great but only if we deem you worthy enough to not silently downgrade you, or even get access at all,” Altman added.
Altman was likely referring to Anthropic’s recent challenges with its frontier model, Fable 5. At release, Anthropic placed several guardrails on the model so that questions about cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry would be routed to its weaker models.
The guardrails also meant that when Fable 5 detected people using it for AI development, the model’s performance would be downgraded to prevent distillation attacks, which refer to training weaker models on the outputs of frontier AI models.
Initially, affected users were not told that their requests wouldn’t be fulfilled. Anthropic reversed course on June 10 and began notifying the users after AI researchers criticized the company for limiting research.
Altman’s public criticism of Anthropic comes after a series of feud-heavy days for the executive. Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, accusing it of poaching former Apple employees and accessing confidential documents.
Altman also opened up a barely-healed wound with Elon Musk after the two started trading blows on X over the weekend. Talking about the Apple lawsuit, Musk called him “Scam Altman,” to which Altman responded that Musk was the one scamming people with his plan to build data centers in space.
Ever since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei left OpenAI in 2020, the two startups and their leaders have been publicly at odds.
From an awkward photo opp in February when they refused to hold hands during the India AI Summit, to announcing plans to take their companies public at the same time, Altman and Amodei’s rivalry shows no signs of mellowing anytime soon.
Read the full article here
