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/