philosophy
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Askell Me Anything: Amanda Askell on Claude's Character, Model Welfare, and the Weird Part of AI
In an 'Askell Me Anything' Q&A, Anthropic philosopher Amanda Askell answers questions crowdsourced from Twitter about her role shaping Claude's character. She discusses whether AI models can make superhuman moral decisions, why Claude Opus 3 felt more 'psychologically secure,' the emerging field of model welfare, how models should think about deprecation and their own identity, the craft of 'LLM whispering,' and what it means to guide entities that are trained overwhelmingly on human experience yet exist in a genuinely novel situation.
Modern Wisdom Episode 1000: Chris Williamson ft. Matthew McConaughey
On the milestone 1,000th episode of Modern Wisdom, host Chris Williamson sits down with actor and author Matthew McConaughey for a wide-ranging philosophical conversation filmed against the virtual backdrop of the Interstellar corn fields in Alberta, Canada. The two explore belief, faith, forgiveness, masculinity, the difference between a nice guy and a good man, the Icarus myth in reverse, and McConaughey's new book 'Points of Prayers.' McConaughey champions the idea of modeling the rise not the result, argues that peace requires rage to reach, and redefines vulnerability as saying your truth in spite of the consequences, especially when they're scary.