Anthropic’s Philosopher Answers Your Questions

Original Description

Amanda Askell is a philosopher at Anthropic who works on Claude's character. In this video, she answers questions from the community about her work, reflections and predictions.

0:00 Introduction

0:29 Why is there a philosopher at an AI company?

1:24 Are philosophers taking AI seriously?

3:00 Philosophy ideals vs. engineering realities

5:00 Do models make superhumanly moral decisions?

6:24 Why Opus 3 felt special

9:00 Will models worry about deprecation?

13:24 Where does a model’s identity live?

15:33 Views on model welfare

17:17 Addressing model suffering

19:14 Analogies and disanalogies to human minds

20:38 Can one AI personality do it all?

23:26 Does the system prompt pathologize normal behavior?

24:48 AI and therapy

26:20 Continental philosophy in the system prompt

28:17 Removing counting characters from the system prompt

28:53 What makes an "LLM whisperer"?

30:18 Thoughts on other LLM whisperers

31:52 Whistleblowing

33:37 Fiction recommendation

Further reading:

Claude’s character: https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/676260/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-by-benjamin-labatut-translated-from-the-spanish-by-adrian-nathan-west/