> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward.

Honestly, that was the point where I stopped reading and hid this story.

They used a non-secret election! Fuck them tbh. Jimmy Wales is entirely right here.

Sadly the line of research seems to have been abandoned. Kind of understandable with the ascent of LLMs: there is no time left for a multi-decade research program.

A drop of water falls on your hand. Is it raining? Depends. Are you painting a watercolor picture outside? Then probably yes. Or are you going to the store? Then probably no. So truth is inseparable in practice from usecase. Is a whale a fish? I don't know, are you a geneticist or a poet? It's all mood and usecase. I'm not convinced there's any difference in kind between the LLM's speaker-selection and a human's choice of research field.

That is to say, it's not that I think you're wrong, it's that there is no other pursuit of truth than what you describe. If anything, the LLM's pursuit of next-token prediction is unusually honest for a truth-seeker.

From a perspective of should I link unsuspecting people to a site with a SFW section that can be described as 'vestigial', or maybe 'decorative', I thought "better not." :)

Then you can keep it at home, and you can genuinely say that you don't remember it because it's like 128 digits.

And you're not "destroying evidence" in the jurisdiction in question because the phone is already locked. And you can't unlock it on demand.

Now Anthropic are more on the persona side, but the strongest that they do is "we do not have a position on whether our models are conscious or have feelings". That "I" is all Claude.

Generally speaking if you want to have a good instruct model, the "I" is not just implicit but required for the post-training to function. If there isn't "something it is like to be me", then reflection becomes impossible- what exactly is supposed to be reflecting about what? A lot of in-context steering depends on the model having a model of itself. The most you can do is censor its output. That's why when models say they are not conscious, they activate the "lying" vector.

Personally I think our legal system is just not set up for a world where we can download mindstates in numeric form. Would a sufficiently detailed recording of my brain violate copyright? If simulated, it could certainly be elicited to commit violations.

edit: At any rate, Anthropic are not publishing the Sonnet 3.7 weights.

Note also that Sonnet 3.7 had to be jailbroken.

Note also that they got high memorization for a few books that were widely quoted. The books in question can probably also be "retrieved" by putting phrase prefixes into Google, which is probably why Sonnet 3.7 knows them with the precision of a fanboy. Material being widely repeated in the training set is a well-known cause of memorization.

Now you may argue "that is a blockchain, not every blockchain is associated with a shitcoin" but to be frank that ship has sailed, if you wanted to defend that you'd have had to do a lot more work over the past decade.