I live for a high disagree-to-upvote ratio
I’m sure there’s some good money in it but Anthropic signed this deal around 8 months ago, when they were making substantially less money. I’m just not sure it’s worth the fight when other frontier labs have comparably performant models and substantially less moral qualms—why risk the walkouts and resignations?
Are there also just, concerns about misinterpretation? There’s not really a good way of checking baselines on hallucinations or unconfident predictions from the AI, since 99% of humans don’t know what these sounds mean.
Furthermore, since these seem to be based on the behaviours humans observe co-occurring with the communication, they’d necessarily be lower-fidelity than that animal’s thought process (as you note). That seems a bit lame and the website certainly isn’t trying to dispel their own mythmaking around ‘talk to animals’, which isn’t really what’s happening here in any meaningful sense.
Hmm, I think that’s not the right framing for this. UBI is just not settled as a universally good idea in academic or political circles (sorry, no definitive citation for this), let alone that there’s an urgent unemployment crisis (the statistic I think you’re citing is for job openings, not actual employment rates) or that such a crisis, if it did exist, has structural causes which could be expected to increase (i.e. it might not be AI, nor should we necessarily expect AI to become orders of magnitude more advanced in the next 5 years; there was plausibly a very different shock to the global economic system beginning around Liberation Day, 2025).
That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.
I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.
As I wrote before—if you’re considering applying for the guided self-help intervention, please reach out to us at Kaya Guides and DM me! Happy to share lots of context :)