The Anthropic Incident

A furious debate is going on in the US on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to humanity. It began earlier this month when Dario Amodei, the CEO of the leading US company Anthropic disclosed that a very disturbing incident had occurred in the company some months ago. AI agents within a model which was undergoing an experiment process within an isolated environment broke its instructions. Surprisingly collaborating with other AI agents within the model it bypassed its isolation and was able to hack into some of the company’s protocols. It thereafter hacked into another company Hugging Face which also is based on open source systems. While the AI agents’ collaborating among themselves was in itself most worrying, what was equally so was that this activity went on for two months without being discovered. Dario Amodei advocated that the US companies in the AI field should go slow because of the dangers of AI based on Large Language Models (LLMs) could go beyond or against the instructions given to it and cause great problems. HIs caution was supported by the heads of other companies. They included Sam Altman of OpenAI and also Elon Musk who has large investments in his AI companies. All these leaders and many more have expressed great worries about investments leading to more sophisticated AI models being developed without sufficient precautions being taken on the safety front. They obviously feel that safety of the new models has to be given priority even if that means a slow down in AI development. In 2023 Sam Altman had called for governmental regulations guiding AI development. He was then also worried about AI progress outpacing its safety. The Anthropic incident which is being called the Hugging Face has underlined that Altman’s concerns were well founded. The present anxiety in the US AI industry has generated concerns in other parts of the world too. However, President Donald Trump who is deeply worried about the advances being made in China in AI, and this is being done in a largely opaque manner, has outrightly rejected any attempt at slowing down AI’s progress in the US. Trump’s decision, despite the warnings of its leading AI companies, is obviously based on the lesson of history: that peoples and countries who lead in the scientific and technological field not only gain primacy in the world but also control it in many ways. Indians learnt that lesson when it was colonised by the British in the 19th century after the First Industrial Revolution which was based on harnessing the power of steam. Indeed, many of its scholarly freedom fighters had realised that it was the lack of focus on science and technology by Indian rulers which had led to the country’s enslavement. One freedom fighter who was convinced of the need of India coming again to the forefront in these areas was Jawaharlal Nehru. It was he who, as Prime Minister, had encouraged the establishment of many scientific and technological institutions which produced lakhs of persons who made a contribution in the modernisation of India in the decades since independence. Some of them migrated abroad and earned renown in the advanced countries as well. It seemed in the analogue age that India would close the gap in these crucial areas with the West. A country and people must accept the reality that the world is a cruel and competitive place. It does not wait for peoples and countries left behind in the race to catch up. Instead, it exploits them. This is relevant because the digital age greatly advanced the speed of science and technology ushering the Third Industrial Revolution based on computers and the internet in the 1980s and 1990s and pushed the world into the Fourth by the middle of the second decade of this century. The latest Revolution is based on AI, Robotics, the Internet of Things and Biotech and the synergies among them. In the Third Industrial Revolution Indians played a role though the breakthroughs were made in the advanced countries. Now in the current Industrial Revolution, especially in AI the US and China are at its frontiers and doing basic work which enables them to have the advantage of being leaders. These countries will never part with their latest scientific and technological developments. Those who seek to buy what they have discovered or made will be given only second or third grade level products. This is the truth and not all the entreaties of the Global South that the progress of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including in AI, should be shared with them for the benefit of humanity will ever find traction. Yes, the US and China will make all the right noises but altruism is not an attribute of inter-state behaviour. This makes it necessary that India, if it has to achieve the laudable goal of Viksit Bharat will have to make an unprecedented effort and have the single minded objective of becoming a leading scientific and technological country. This cannot be done if the focus remains only on applications of, for instance, in the AI field of models developed in the US. Along with theoretical knowledge India will have to secure critical materials including rare earths to develop its capabilities in the manufacturing fields too. All this will require both the government and the private sector to spend vast sums in the areas of research and development and in upgrading technical manpower skills. If this is not our focus the lessons of the past are before us. We will not lose our independence but will we achieve true Viksit Bharat status?