YouSaid · the spoken record

Dario Amodei

lines on the record: 181
first: 2024-11-11
most recent: 2024-11-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thanks for having me. I just hope we can get it right and make it real. And if there's one message I want to send, it's that to get all this stuff right, to make it real, we both need to build the technology, build the companies, the economy around using this technology positively. But we also need to address the risks because those risks are in our way. They're landmines on the way from here to there. And we have to diffuse those landmines if we want to get there.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, I realized it would be very long, and two, I'm very aware of and very much try to avoid just being, I don't know, I don't know what the term for it is, but one of these people who's kind of overconfident and has an opinion on everything and kind of says a bunch of stuff and isn't an expert. I very much tried to avoid that, but I have to admit, once I got the biology sections, like I wasn't an expert. And so as much as I expressed uncertainty, probably I said a bunch of things that were embarrassing are wrong.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we make sure that that fair world reaches everyone? When things have gone wrong for humans, they've often gone wrong because humans mistreat other humans. That is maybe in some ways even more than the autonomous risk of AI or the question of meaning. That is the thing I worry about most, the concentration of power, the abuse of power, structures like autocracies and dictatorships where a small number of people exploits a large number of people. I'm very worried about that.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning will be important to them as it is important to them now. But we should not forget the importance of that and that the idea of meaning as kind of the only important thing is in some ways an artifact of a small subset of people who have been economically fortunate. But I think all that said, I think a world is possible with powerful AI that not only has as much meaning for everyone, but that has more meaning for everyone, right? That can allow everyone to see worlds and experiences that it was either possible for no one to see or possible for very few people to experience. So I am optimistic about meaning. I worry about economics and the concentration of power. That's actually what I worry about more. I worry about.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could imagine if we handle things badly in an AI world, we could set things up where people don't have any long-term source of meaning or any, but that's more a set of choices we make. That's more a set of the architecture of a society with these powerful models. If we design it badly and for shallow things, then that might happen. I would also say that most people's lives today, while admirably, you know, they work very hard to find meaning in those lives, like, look, you know, we who are privileged and who are developed means technologies, we should have empathy for people, not just here, but in the rest of the world, who spend a lot of their time kind of scraping by to survive, assuming we can distribute the benefits of these technology to everywhere, like their lives are going to get a hell of a lot better.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, kind of rob you of the meaning of the whole thing, you know, like I still made important choices, including moral choices. I still sacrificed. I still had to kind of gain all these skills. Or just like a similar exercise, you know, think back to like, you know, one of the historical figures who, you know, discovered electromagnetism or relativity or something. If you told them, well, actually, 20,000 years ago, some alien on, you know, some alien on this planet discovered this before you did.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something that I've written about a little bit in the essay, although I actually give it a bit short shrift, not for any principled reason, but this essay, if you believe it, was originally going to be two or three pages. I was going to talk about it at all hands. And the reason I realized it was important underexplored topic is that I just kept writing things. And I was just like, oh man, I can't do this justice. And so the thing ballooned to like 40 or 50 pages. And then when I got to the work and mean section, I'm like, oh, man, this isn't going to be 100 pages. I'm going to have to write a whole other essay about that. But meaning is actually interesting because you think about like the life that someone lives or something or like, you know, like, you know, let's say you were to put me in like a, I don't know, like a simulated environment or something where I have a job and I'm trying to accomplish things. And I don't know. I like do that for 60 years. And then you're like, oh, oh, like, oops, this was actually all a game, right?”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is really astounding. I feel like as a CEO, I don't get to program that much. And I feel like if six months from now I go back, it'll be completely unrecognizable to”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Productivity by catching a bunch of mistakes, doing a bunch of grunt work for people, and that we haven't even scratched the surface. Anthropic itself, I mean, you can't say, you know, no, you know, it's hard to say what will happen in the future. Currently, we're not trying to make such IDs ourselves. Rather, we're powering the companies like cursor or like cognition or some of the other, you know, Expo in the security space, others that I can mention as well that are building such things themselves on top of our API. And our view has been let a thousand flowers bloom. We don't internally have the resources to try all these different things. Let's let our customers try it. And we'll see who succeeds in maybe different customers will succeed in different ways. So I both think this is super promising. And it's not.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm absolutely convinced that powerful IDs, that there's so much low-hanging fruit to be grabbed there, that right now is just like you talk to the model and it talks back. But look, I mean IDs are great at kind of lots of static analysis of so much as possible with kind of static analysis like many bugs you can find without even writing the code, then IDEs are good for running particular things, organizing your code, measuring coverage of unit tests. Like there's so much that's been possible with the normal IDs. Now you add something like, well, the model can now like write code and run code. Like I am absolutely convinced that over the next year or two, even if the quality of the models didn't improve, that there would be enormous opportunity to enhance people.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problems to deal with aside from misuse and autonomy, and you know, we should take it very seriously. But I think in the near term and maybe even in the medium term, like medium term, like two, three, four years, I expect that humans will continue to have a huge role and the nature of programming will change, but programming as a role, programming as a job will not change. It'll just be less writing things line by line and it'll be more macroscopic.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Small parts of the job that humans still do will expand to fill their entire job in order for the overall productivity to go up. That's something we've seen. You know, it used to be that, you know, writing and editing letters was very difficult and like writing the print was difficult. Well, as soon as you had word processors and then computers and it became easy to produce work and easy to share it, then that became instant and all the focus was on the ideas. So this logic of comparative advantage that expands tiny parts of the tasks to large parts of the tasks and creates new tasks in order to expand productivity, I think that's going to be the case. Again, someday AI will be better at everything and that logic won't apply. And then we all have, humanity will have to think about how to collectively deal with that. And we're thinking about that every day. And that's another one of the grand.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we make the task very narrow, like just write code, AI systems will be able to do that. Now that said, I think comparative advantage is powerful. We'll find that when AIs can do 80% of a coder's job, including most of it that's literally like write code with a given spec, we'll find that the remaining parts of the job become more leveraged for humans. Humans will be more about like high-level system design or, you know, looking at the app and like, is it architected well? And the design and UX aspects. And eventually AI will be able to do those as well, right? That's my vision of the powerful AI system. But I think for much longer than we might expect, we will see that”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to start slowing down soon because you can only get to 100%. But I would guess that in another 10 months, we'll probably get pretty close. We'll be at at least 90%. So again, I would guess, you know, I don't know how long it'll take, but I would guess again 2026, 2026, 2027 Twitter people who crop out these numbers and get rid of the caveats. I don't like you. Go away. I would guess that the kind of task that the vast majority of coders do AI can probably”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's going to be one of the areas that changes fastest for two reasons. One, programming is a skill that's very close to the actual building of the AI. So the farther a skill is from the people who are building the AI, the longer it's going to take to get disrupted by the AI, right? Like I truly believe that AI will disrupt agriculture. Maybe it already has in some ways, but that's just very distant from the folks who are building AI. And so I think it's going to take longer. But programming is the bread and butter of a large fraction of the employees who work at Anthropic and at the other companies. And so it's going to happen fast. The other reason it's going to happen fast is with programming, you close the loop, both when you're training the model and when you're applying the model, the idea that the model can write the code.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we just one step at a time? And can that add up to a lot of steps? Even though we still need clinical trials, even though we still need laws, even though the FDA and other organizations will still not be perfect, can we just move everything in a positive direction? And when you add up all those positive directions, do you get everything that was going to happen from here to 2100 instead happens from 2027 to 2032 or something?”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In animal trials. Again, we won't be able to simulate at all. AI is not God. But can we shift the curve substantially and radically? So I don't know. That would be my picture.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They would be the inventors of a CRISPR type technology. And then I think, you know, as I say in the essay, we'll want to turn, probably turning loose is the wrong term, but we'll want to harness the AI systems to improve the clinical trial system as well. There's some amount of this that's regulatory that's a matter of societal decisions, and that'll be harder. Can we get better at predicting the results of clinical trials? Can we get better at statistical design so that what clinical trials that used to require 5,000 people and therefore needed $100 million in a year to enroll them? Now they need 500 people in two months to enroll them. That's where we should start. And, you know, can we increase success rate of clinical trials by doing things in animal trials that we used to do in clinical trials and doing things in simulations that we used to do?”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, it'll flip around where the AI systems will be the PIs, will be the leaders, and they'll be ordering humans or other AI systems around. So I think that's how it'll work on the research side.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to decide what the next experiment is. I'm going to like write some code and run a statistical analysis. All the things a grad student would do, there will be a computer with an AI that like the professor talks to every once in a while and it says, this is what you're going to do today. The AI system comes to it with questions when it's necessary to run the lab equipment. It may be limited in some ways. It may have to hire a human lab assistant to, you know, to do the experiment and explain how to do it. Or it could, you know, it could use advances in lab automation that are gradually being developed over, have been developed over the last decade or so and will continue to be developed. And so it'll look like there's a human professor and a thousand AI grad students. And if you go to one of these Nobel Prize-winning biologists or so, you'll say, okay, well, you had like 50 grad students. Well, now you have a thousand. And they're smarter than you are, by the way. Then I think.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is well, so I think in the early stages, the AIs are going to be like grad students. You're going to give them a project. You're going to say, you know, I'm the experienced biologist. I've set up the lab, the biology professor, or even the grad students themselves will say, here's what you can do with an AI, you know, like AI system. I'd like to study this. And the AI system, it has all the tools. It can look up all the literature to decide what to do. It can look at all the equipment. It can go to a website and say, hey, I'm going to go to Thermo Fisher or whatever the lab equipment company is, dominant lab equipment company is today. And my time was thermofisher. You know, I'm going to order this new equipment to do this. I'm going to run my experiments. I'm going to, you know, write up a report about my experiments. I'm going to inspect the images for contamination.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beyond this, to gene sequencing, to new types of nanomaterials for observing what's going on inside cells, for antibody drug conjugates, the reason I'm saying all this is that this could be a leverage point for the AI systems, right? The number of such inventions, it's in the mid-double digits or something. Mid double digits may be low triple digits over the history of biology. Let's say I have a million of these AIs like, you know, can they discover a thousand, you know, working together? Can they discover thousands of these very quickly? And does that provide a huge lever instead of trying to leverage the $2 trillion a year we spend on Medicare or whatever, can we leverage the $1 billion a year that's spent to discover, but with much higher quality? And so what is it like being a scientist that works with an AI system? The way I think about it actually.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience within biology is that the biggest problem of biology is that you can't see what's going on. You have very little ability to see what's going on and even less ability to change it, right? What you have is this. From this, you have to infer that there's a bunch of cells that within each cell is 3 billion base pairs of DNA built according to a genetic code. And, you know, there are all these processes that are just going on without any.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think one of the things I went hard on in the essay is let me go back to this idea of, because it's really had an impact on me, this idea that within large organizations and systems there end up being a few people or a few new ideas who kind of cause things to go in a different direction than they would have before, who kind of are disproportionately affect the trajectory. There's a bunch of kind of the same thing going on, right? If you think about the health world, there's like, you know, trillions of dollars to pay out Medicare and other health insurance. And then the NIH is $100 billion. And then if I think of like the few things that have really revolutionized anything, it could be encapsulated in a small fraction of that. And so when I think of like, where will AI have an impact? I'm like, can AI turn that small fraction into a much larger fraction and raise its quality? And within biology, my experience...”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me start with your first questions, and then I'll answer that. Claude wants to know what's in his future, right? Exactly. Who am I going to be working with?”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, look at the end of the day, like, I don't want to represent this as a scientific prediction. People call them scaling laws. That's a misnomer like Moore's law is a misnomer. Moore's law scaling laws, they're not laws of the universe. They're empirical regularities. I am going to bet in favor of them continuing, but I'm not certain of that.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we want. So there are all kinds of things that could derail the whole process. So I don't fully believe the straight line extrapolation. But if you believe the straight line extrapolation, we'll get there in 2026 or 2027. I think the most likely is that there's some mild delay relative to that. I don't know what that delay is, but I think it could happen on schedule. I think there could be a mild delay. I think there are still worlds where it doesn't happen in 100 years. The number of those worlds is rapidly decreasing. We are rapidly running out of truly convincing broccoliers, truly compelling reasons why this will not happen in the next few years. There were a lot more in 2020. Although my guess, my hunch at that time was that we'll make it through all those blockers. So sitting as someone who has seen most of the blockers cleared out of the way, I kind of suspect my hunch, my suspicion is that the rest of them will not block us.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you extrapolate the curves that we've had so far, right? If you say, well, I don't know, we're starting to get to like PhD level and last year we were at undergraduate level and the year before we were at like the level of a high school student. Again, you can quibble with at what tasks and for what we're still missing modalities, but those are being added, like computer use was added, like Imogen was added, like image generation has been added. If you just kind of like, and this is totally unscientific, but if you just kind of like eyeball the rate at which these capabilities are increasing, it does make you think that we'll get there by 2026 or 2027. Again, lots of things could derail it. We could run out of data. You know, we might not be able to scale clusters as much as we want. Like, you know, maybe Taiwan gets blown up or something and, you know, then we can't produce as many G.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, this is, of course, the thing I've been grappling with for many years. And I'm not at all confident. Every time, if I say 2026 or 2027, there will be like a zillion like people on Twitter who will be like, hey, I see you said 2026, 2020, and it'll be repeated for the next two years that like this is definitely when I think it's going to happen. Whoever's exerting these clips will crop out the thing I just said and only say the thing I'm about to say. But I'll just say it anyway”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biologist was the feeling I had when I was writing it that it's like this would be such a beautiful future if we can if we can just make it happen, right? If we can just get the landmines out of the way and make it happen, there's so much beauty and elegance and moral force behind it if we can just And it's something we should all be able to agree on, right? Like as much as we fight about all these political questions is this something that could actually bring us together. But you were asking when will we get this?”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as the technology starts to roll out, as it succeeds in some places, in the folks who are most willing to adopt it, the specter of competition gives them a wind at their backs because they can point within their large organization. They can say, look, these other guys are doing this, right? You know, one bank can say, look, this new fangled hedge fund is doing this thing. They're going to eat our lunch. In the US, we can say we're afraid China is going to get there before we are. And that combination, the specter of competition plus a few visionaries within the organizations that in many ways are sclerotic, you put those two things together and it actually makes something happen. I mean, that's interesting. It's a balanced fight between the two because inertia is very powerful. But eventually over and enough time, the innovative approach breaks.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there's a lot of resistance and lack of understanding. But the thing that makes me feel that progress will in the end happen moderately fast, not incredibly fast, but moderately fast, is that you talk to what I find is I find over and over again, again in large companies, even in governments, which have been actually surprisingly forward-leaning. You find two things that move things forward. One, you find a small fraction of people within a company, within a government who really see the big picture, who see the whole scaling hypothesis, who understand where AI is going, or at least understand where it's going within their industry. And there are a few people like that within the current US government who really see the whole picture. And those people see that this is the most important thing in the world until they agitate for it. And the thing they alone are not enough to succeed because they're a small set of people within a large organ.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Newfangled AI that hasn't been invented yet. So you could have a perspective that's like, well, this is amazing technically, but it's all a nothing burger. You know, I think Tyler Cowan, who wrote something response to my essay, has that perspective. I think he thinks the radical change will happen eventually, but he thinks it'll take 50 or 100 years. And you could have even more static perspectives on the whole thing. I think there's some truth to it. I think the timescale is just too long. And I can see it. I can actually see both sides with today's AI. So, you know, a lot of our customers are large enterprises who are used to doing things a certain way. I've also seen it in talking to governments, right? Those are prototypical institutions, entities that are slow to change. But the dynamic I see over and over again is, yes, it takes a long time to move the ship.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's on one side. On the other side, there's another set of perspectives, which I have actually, in some ways, more sympathy for, which is, look, we've seen big productivity increases before, right? You know, economists are familiar with studying the productivity increases that came from the computer revolution and the internet revolution. And generally, those productivity increases were underwhelming. They were less than you might imagine. There was a quote from Robert Solo. You see the computer revolution everywhere except the productivity statistics. So why is this the case? People point to the structure of firms, the structure of enterprises, how slow it's been to roll out our existing technology to very poor parts of the world, which I talk about in the essay, right? How do we get these technologies to the poorest parts of the world that are behind on cell phone technology, computers, medicine, let alone...”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, you know, it's going to need to follow basic human laws if we want to have an actually good world, like we're going to have to have an AI system that interacts with humans, not one that kind of creates its own legal system or disregards all the laws or all of that. So as inefficient as these processes are, we're going to have to deal with them because there needs to be some popular and democratic legitimacy in how these systems are rolled out. We can't have a small group of people who are developing these systems say this is what's best for everyone, right? I think it's wrong and I think in practice it's not going to work anyway. So you put all those things together and we're not going to change the world and upload everyone in five minutes. I don't think A, I don't think it's going to happen. And B, to the extent that it could happen, it's not the way to lead to a good world.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into these human systems, often the level of intelligence may just not be the limiting factor, right? It just may be that it takes a long time to do something. Now, if the AI system circumvented all governments, if it just said I'm dictator of the world and I'm going to do whatever, some of these things it could do, again, the things having to do with complexity, I still think a lot of things would take a while. I don't think it helps that the AI systems can produce a lot of energy or go to the moon. Some people in comments responded to the essay saying the AI system can produce a lot of energy and smarter AI systems. That's missing the point. That kind of cycle doesn't solve the key problems that I'm talking about here. So I think a bunch of people missed the point there. But even if it were completely on the line and could get around all these human obstacles, it would have trouble. But again, if you want this to be an AI system that doesn't take over the world, that doesn't destroy humanity, then.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's just, you know, you just look at even the simplest. Know people have concerns, they think things are conspiracy theories. Like it's just been very difficult. It's also been very difficult to get very simple things through the regulatory system, right? I think, and I don't want to disparage anyone who works in regulatory systems of any technology. There are hard trade-offs they have to deal with. They have to save lives. But the system as a whole, I think makes some obvious trade-offs that are very far from maximizing human welfare. And so if we bring AI systems into this,”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of things that you can't predict how they're, you know, they're complex enough that like just iterating, just running the experiment is going to beat any modeling no matter how smart the system doing the modeling is.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invented like will be invented. I'm caricaturing this a little bit. But I think that's one extreme. And the reason that I think that's not the case is that one, I think they just neglect the laws of physics. Like it's only possible to do things so fast in the physical world. Like some of those loops go through, you know, producing faster hardware takes a long time to produce faster hardware. Things take a long time. There's this issue of complexity. Like, I think no matter how smart you are, people talk about, oh, we can make models of biological systems. It'll do everything the biological systems. Look, I think computational modeling can do a lot. I did a lot of computational modeling when I worked in biology. But like just.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And why? So, yeah, let's describe the extreme. So, like one extreme would be, well, look, you know. If we look at kind of evolutionary history, like there was this big acceleration where for hundreds of thousands of years we just had like, you know, single-celled organisms and then we had mammals and then we had apes and then that quickly turned to humans. Humans quickly built industrial civilization. And so this is going to keep speeding up. And there's no ceiling at the human level. Once models get much, much smarter than humans, they'll get really good at building the next models. And if you write down like a simple differential equation, like this is an exponential. And so what's going to happen is that models will build faster models. Models will build faster models. And those models will build nanobots that can take over the world and produce much more energy than you could produce otherwise. And so if you just kind of like solve this abstract differential equation, then like five days after we build the first AI that's more powerful than humans, then the world will be filled with these AIs and every possible technology that could be.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, you might imagine from outside the field there's only one of these, right? That you made it, you've only made one. But the truth is that the scale up is very quick. We do this today. We make a model and then we deploy thousands, maybe tens of thousands of instances of it. I think by the time, you know, certainly within two to three years, whether we have these super powerful AIs or not, clusters are going to get to the size where you'll be able to deploy millions of these and they'll be faster than humans. And so if your picture is, oh, we'll have one and it'll take a while to make them. My point there was, no, actually you have millions of them right away.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computers that are faster than what we have today. There's no point at which you pass the threshold and you're like, oh my God, we're doing a totally new type of computation. And so I feel that way about AGI. Like there's just a smooth exponential. And if by AGI you mean like AI is getting better and better and like gradually it's going to do more and more of what humans do until it's going to be smarter than humans and then it's going to get smarter even from there then yes I believe in AGI if but if AGI is some discrete or separate thing which is the way people often talk about it then it's it's kind of a meaningless buzzword”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you what else I don't. This is like a pointless semantic point, but I. I keep talking about it back to naming again. So I'm just going to do it once more. I think it's a little like, let's say it was like 1995 and Moore's Law is making the computers faster. And like for some reason, there had been this verbal tick that like everyone was like, well, someday we're going to have like supercomputers. And like supercomputers are going to be able to do all these things that like, you know, once we have supercomputers, we'll be able to like sequence the genome and we'll be able to do other things. And so like one, it's true. The computers are getting faster and as they get faster, they're going to be able to do all these great things. But there's like, there's no discrete point at which you had a supercomputer and previous computers were not like supercomputer is a term we use, but like it's a vague term to just describe like”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make a try at explaining, explaining, explain what the benefits are, both because I think it's something we can all get behind. And I want people to understand, I want them to really understand that this isn't doomers versus accelerationists. that if you have a true understanding of where things are going with AI, and maybe that's the more important axis. AI is moving fast versus AI is not moving fast, then you really appreciate the benefits and you really, you want humanity, our civilization, to seize those benefits, but you also get very serious about anything that could derail them.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Line of reasoning that I just gave might be. If you kind of only talk about risks, your brain only thinks about risks. And so I think it's actually very important to understand what if things do go well? And the whole reason we're trying to prevent these risks is not because we're afraid of technology, not because we want to slow it down. It's because We can get to the other side of these risks, right? If we can run the gauntlet successfully to put it in stark terms, then on the other side of the gauntlet are all these great things. And these things are worth fighting for. And these things can really inspire people. And I think I imagine because look, you have all these investors, all these VCs, all these AI companies talking about all the positive benefits of AI. But as you point out, it's weird. There's actually a dearth of”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have spent a lot of time in Anthropic. I spent a lot of effort on how do we address the risks of AI, right? How do we think about those risks? Like we're trying to do a race to the top, you know, that requires us to build all these capabilities and the capabilities are cool. But we're like a big part of what we're trying to do is address the risks. And then justification for that is like, well, you know, all these positive things, you know, the market is this very healthy organism, right? It's going to produce all the positive things. The risks, I don't know. We might mitigate them. We might not. And so we can have more impact by trying to mitigate the risks. But I noticed that one flaw in that way of thinking, and it's not a change in how seriously I take the risks, it's maybe a change in how I talk about them. Is that no matter how kind of logical or rational that”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm fully expecting to definitely be wrong about all the details. I might be just spectacularly wrong about the whole thing and people will laugh at me for years. That's just how the future works.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that's a pretty useful direction. Again, it has a lot in common with constitutional AI. So again, another example of like a race to the top, right? We have something that's like we think, you know, a better and more responsible way of doing things. It's also a competitive advantage than others kind of discover that it has advantages and then start to do that thing. We then no longer have the competitive advantage, but it's good from the perspective that now everyone has adopted a positive practice that others were not adopting. And so our response to that as well looks like we need a new competitive advantage in order to keep driving this race upwards. So that's how I generally feel about that. I also think every implementation of these things is different. So, you know, there were some things in the model spec that were not inconstitutional AI. And so, you know, we can always adopt those things or, you know, at least learn from them. So again, I think this is an example.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of democracy and the rule of law. Beyond that, it gets very uncertain. And there are goal is generally for the models to be more neutral, to not espouse the particular point of view, and more just be kind of like wise agents or advisors that will help you think things through and will present possible considerations, but don't express strong or specific opinions.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'll give like a practical answer and a more abstract answer. I think the practical answer is, look, in practice, models get used by all kinds of different customers, right? And so you can have this idea where the model can have specialized rules or principles. We fine-tune versions of models implicitly, we've talked about doing it explicitly, having special principles that people can build into the models. So from a practical perspective, the answer can be very different from different people. You know, customer service agent behaves very differently from a lawyer and obeys different principles. But I think at the base of it, there are specific principles that models have to obey. I think a lot of them are things that people would agree with. Everyone agrees that we don't want models to present these CBRN risks. I think we can go a little further and agree with some basic principles.”
2024-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source