Overall this suggests to them that the current speedup is likely greater than what the study could measure.

If you've invested in expensive capabilities training, of course you don't want this, so it's in Anthropic's economic interest to hinder it however they can, and that's enough to explain their behaviour here.

Anthropic seems to genuinely care about safety though, which for the rest of us means not having models that enabling easier cyberattacks, targeted scams, and the rarer but more severe risks like people trying to create and release new pathogens. This means walking a tight line, especially as models become more capable, and often wrapping a model in layers of defences against misuse.

If those capabilities transfer to a closed competitor model, all bets are off in terms of whether the competitor will apply the same defences.

If those capabilities transfer to an open weight model, not only will there be no ring of defences around the model, any defences you put into the model itself can easily be stripped away. So although it's nice to have capable open models, it will increasingly bad for us all if open models keep fast-following closed model capabilities as they have been, at least until we have solved the active research problem of keeping them safe.

This is all to say that, however you might feel about Anthropic, we might still prefer that they can deter this kind of distillation for now.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125096

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...

Share: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative...

The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.

Overall it felt elegant, and needed no maintenance after setting it up, but honestly it was never used. I think the need to look back in time was rarer than expected, and git notes being hidden by default didn’t help for awareness.

The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.

This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.

India: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...

China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...

Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.

The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!

If the cost is small to setting a coding agent (e.g. aider) on a task, seeing if it reaches a quick solution, and just aborting if it spins out, you can solve a subset of these types of issues very quickly, instead of leaving them in issue tracking to grow stale. That lets you up the polish on your work.

That's still quite a different story to having it do the core, most important part of your work. That feels a little further away. One of the challenges is the scout rule, the refactoring alongside change that makes the codebase nicer. I feel like today it's easier to get a correct change that slightly degrades codebase quality, than one that maintains it.

"Millions of children learn only very little. How can the world provide a better education to the next generation?" https://ourworldindata.org/better-learning

Our topic page on Global Education: https://ourworldindata.org/global-education

Our wider catalog of education data: https://ourworldindata.org/data?topics=Global+Education