It's definitely a marketing strategy. "Our technology is so good it might destroy the world. So we're letting you use it for 19.99 a month." It's just a completely inconsistent position. Who benefits from the government saying only openAI and a few other companies can make this stuff? Would openAI rather talk about the (non-existent) existential threat of AGI or actual problems with their technology like data privacy issues and the amount of power their bullshit consumes?

Yeah, I think that's well said. I think the doomerism is more of a sell to investors than users sorta situation but it cuts both ways, which makes me sad for the tech industry having just made this same mistake with crypto. Who benefits from this? Anyone invested who doesn’t want to disappoint an investor (LPS, VCs, and founders) and/or anyone who’s ego is invested in the space and/or anyone who is raising money in the space and reliant on the technology and/or AI companies who benefit from the publicity/legitimacy of having their CEO talk to congress and/or AI companies who get an entire NYT piece run for a week about how an LLM is going to kill us all and/or any public company that can benefit from a stock rally by pushing the narrative that they’re in a land grab market and have the coveted goods and/or any large company that could benefit from blocking out nimbler competitors by getting arduous regulation passed… I could go on. You realize that like every 10th article on HN is an AI existentialism piece? Reddit is even worse. It also diverts the conversation from LLMs being shitty to the machines are coming. I’m fine with doomerism (getting hysterical can be fun) but I think it’s completely unwarranted with where we’re at. I don’t think we should overlook the risks associated with intellectual property, impersonation, data privacy, the ever growing body of bot spam destroying the internet etc. but worrying about the more dramatic risks has proven to be a pretty effective diversion tactic from the obvious acute problems — namely that LLMs have very little practical utility as they are now and the little utility they do have is primarily beneficial to spammers/scammers. I can already feel the person chiming in to tell me they love co-pilot (please just learn the language you’re working in).

But to be clear I’m not saying this is a methodical highly coordinated ad campaign amongst multiple companies. I don’t think human beings are that competent. I think it’s way more grassroots and feeds on cultural tropes that have existed since at least the 1950s but probably the early 1900s. I think Anthropic’s leadership probably genuinely believes their own bullshit but I also think they understand that that same bullshit has raised over a billion in funding.

We'll said, and I agree. The primary use cases are things where accuracy doesn't matter like spam and scams.