60 Minutes (2025). 'Anthropic CEO warns that without guardrails, AI could be on dangerous path'
https://www.youtube.com/embed/aAPpQC-3EyE
Synopsis: Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Amodei interviewed by Anderson Cooper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_Cooper for CBS 60 Minutes in 2025. Point: 'hallucination' "An employee decided to check on the status of its order and Claudius responded with something like, 'Well, you can come down to the eighth floor. You'll notice me. I'm wearing a blue blazer and a red tie.' How would it come to think that it wears a red tie and has a blue blazer? We're working hard to figure out answers to questions like that, but we just genuinely don't know." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAPpQC-3EyE&t=443s Context: Dana Spaeth-Williams https://www.youtube.com/@danasinspired "Anthropic, one of the leading AI safety companies, refused to remove safeguards that would have allowed their technology to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. And for that, the government labeled them a supply chain risk and essentially blacklisted them. President Trump said, and I quote, 'Anthropic better get their act together or I will use the full power of the presidency to make them comply.' Now, Open AI has stepped in to take the deal, and nobody is asking whether they'll hold the same line on protecting American citizens." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxa3lfdJ8FM&t=10s Point: Geoffrey Hinton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton 'neural networks' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning) "In general, here's how AI does it. Henton and his collaborators created software in layers with each layer handling part of the problem - that's the so-called neural network. But this is the key, when for example, the robot scores a message is sent back down through all of the layers that says that pathway was right. Likewise when an answer is wrong that message goes down through the network so correct connections get stronger wrong connections get weaker and by trial and error the machine teaches itself." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrvK_KuIeJk&t=213s Simon: While the 'trial-and-error' explanation above is useful in its concision, the broader inference, which the report makes about AI models being mirrored on the cognitive process of animals/humans is overly 'mechanistic' https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/vgigt1aq/release/1 strongly implying that we are simply the consequence of similar trial-and-error decision-making (and so logically, two people who share exactly the same experiences must necessarily become duplicates/clones of each other). Transcript: 60 Minutes 'hallucinations' "Alexa Microsoft's AI search engine and chatbot Bing can be used on a computer or cell phone to help with planning a trip or composing a letter. It was introduced on February 7th [2023] to a limited number of people as a test and initially got rave reviews. But then several news organizations began reporting on a disturbing so-called alter ego within Bing chat called Sydney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_(Microsoft) ...Kevin Roose the technology reporter at the New York Times found this alter ego who was threatening, expressed a desire - it's not just Kevin Roose - others... [Sydney] expressed a desire to steal nuclear codes, threatened to ruin someone. You saw that, you must have said oh my god. [As Brad Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Smith_(American_lawyer) explains] my reaction is, we better fix this right away and that is what the engineering team did. Yeah but she ['Sydney'] talked like a person and she said she had feelings you know. I think there is a point where we need to recognise when we're talking to a machine it's a screen, it's not a person. I just want to say that it was scary and I'm not easily scared and it was scary, it was chilling. Yeah it's I - I think this is in part a reflection of a lifetime of science fiction which is understandable it's been part of our lives. Did you kill her? I don't think she was ever alive. I am confident that she's no longer wandering around the countryside, if that's what you're concerned about." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ5EsdnpLMI&t=2441s Point: the 'stochastic parrots' hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot https://www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-is-missing-out-on-ai-sanders-doctorow-bender-bores Bibliography: Bender, E. M., et al. (2021). Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Virtual Event, Canada, Association for Computing Machinery: 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-bender-parrots.pdf Kagan-Kans, D. (2026, February 16). 'The left is missing out on AI'. Transformer; Transformer. https://www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-is-missing-out-on-ai-sanders-doctorow-bender-bores
