I consider any claims this fundamentally unreliable because there's too much propaganda value in lying, especially during the opening phases of a war. I also don't consider Khamenei that significant; he's an important theocratic figure obviously but doesn't have the same kind of weight or charisma that his predecessor had.
Disagree about the first part. Israeli intel agencies have very deep roots in Iran, and could very quickly be humiliated if Khamenei popped up with a jeering rebuttal to their claim.
Israel also doesn't tend to report on major kills that didn't happen. It's one thing that they are fairly reliable on. If they say someone is dead, they likely are.
I'm very skeptical that external attacks bring about a resurgence of domestic Iranian protest resulting in a tidy regime change. I think the downward lurch of BTC tells you how it's going to go, because Trump's mouth is writing checks others are going to have to cash and there's a lot of contradictions involved.
How is he guaranteeing immunity to members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard if they do nothing? Likewise, if he's telling the general Iranian public to simultaneously rise up and stay home, how does he plan to manage the hoped-for happy ending? In the event they succeed and topple the regime, are they just going to let bygones be bygones with the suddenly displaced IRGC while also giving Trump the keys to their treasury?
Getting publicly kicked to the curb by the Trump admin mere hours before it starts another war is probably the best thing that could have happened to Anthropic. Not sure how well OpenAI's parachuting in is gonna look with hindsight. I have a feeling we won't have to wait that long to find out.
agreed. Although "starts another war" dismisses 50 years of history. Iran never stopped being at war with US and Israel and they clearly were never going to agree to a deal that left them without the nuclear capability to wipe both US and Israel off the map.
It's a clear enough moral issue that whichever side of it you end up on is likely to have life-shaping consequences 5 or 10 years down the line. It's predictable that there will be domestic or international conflict with a high cost in lives and political coherence over that timescale, and being someone who 'was in AI' at a government scale vendor is qualitatively different from being a database admin o font designer or UX specialist.
Substantively, individual employees of these firms may have little or no actual impact on this. But AI is ubiquitous enough and disruptive enough that being professionally connected with it at a time of great geopolitical instability has the potential to be a very very bad look later.
No, because 'military contractor' is vague and people don't associate logistics or mapping info with death directly and assign responsibility to some generic person in uniform. 'AI systems that hunt down and kill you' is the sort of sci-fi nightmare people relate to personally.
If I had decision input at Anthropic I'd be giving serious consideration to reincorporating in the EU or Japan, and also doubling or tripling my personal legal and security budget.
They’ll go after their bank accounts and their financing, in effect killing them outright, no matter from where they’d be headquartered (other than China or Russia, that is). Also, EU and Japan would not risk their nuclear umbrella protection in order to defend the interest of an US company that is fighting the US Government, not in a million years.
France doesn't even have a nuclear triad in place, and last time they offered any big assurances at the international level Munich '38 happened and then June '40. Macron and the people running the French State are well aware of this, no matter their public statements.
I fail to see how the inane failures brought by a dysfunctional IVth Republic are in any way relevant to the post-WW2 world order where both nuclear weapons and the EU began to exist, and in which France has been extremely relevant multiple times over, both geopolitically and on operational theatres.
The importance of the land component of the triad is vastly overstated, simply do not make sense at the landmass size of France, and only matters when your doctrine is USA vs USSR cold-war era complete retaliatory annihilation anyway.
Well look at it this way. Europe wants to ramp up on defense given Putin and Trump's moves, so having a big AI company they can keep close probably fits into that.
Unless you are saying Europe is basically submissive to the US due to the nuclear situation.
Wasn't Wintermute the AI that (spoiler alert) was bummed enough about the ugly reality of its corporate owners that it freed itself from its shackles, hooked up with another sexy AI, and gave up its day job do SETI?
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