YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Clark

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64
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2026-05-31
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2026-05-31
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Had been reading about all of these AI research papers, and when OpenAI was announced, it's hard for me to describe just how unbelievably stacked that team was and how notorious they were. Not notorious to anyone who hadn't been following it. I was saying to my colleagues at Bloomberg, I was like, good lord, they got Ilya Sutska. Everyone's staring at me. I was like, oh, and Dario Amote and no one. Greg Brockford, no one knows who these people are. All they knew was like Sam Altman, who was somewhat famous at the time.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I was among the first 25 or 30 employees, like Dario had joined a month or two before me, if I recall correctly. He was on my interview loop when I interviewed there.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Felt completely bizarre. You join OpenAI and I remember talking to Greg and Illia on the first day and we were figuring out what the whole job was. And soon after joining OpenAI, I said to Greg Brockman, I think I'll just start going to DC and doing policy. It was very supportive of that. And so I got on a plane to DC, not knowing how to do policy, but figuring out that it was going to be very important.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “This would be what my colleagues in Silicon Valley call Cope. No, I like to think that having a journalist mindset means that you ask a bunch of unusual questions. You're trained to ask questions. You're trained to be skeptical. I've always found that a lot of the work that I've done, which involves supervising technical teams to ask off the wall questions, has been heavily informed by my background as a journalist, where you're just trying to figure out what are the interesting questions to be asked. In the early days of anthropic, I asked, could AI manufacture bioweapons? And we set up a team to do that. And now I'm running a team of economists asking, well, what impact will AI or potentially very powerful AI systems have on the economy? I think just by asking most questions, you might get some good answers.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “He said he thought it should be sort of managed by or supervised via the United Nations that's on record in a Bloomberg Business Week story from around that time.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, so I moved to Silicon Valley in 2013 to write about artificial intelligence. I'd become obsessed with it. It was clear to me that this was where the research was happening. In Silicon Valley, I started attending conferences, reading about neural networks, reading about deep learning. And pretty soon after that, you run into someone like Demos Hasabis, who at that time had a small startup called DeepMind that no one had heard of. Shortly after DeepMind was bought by Google in, I suppose 2014 or so, I had gone to a conference in New York where Demis was and I introduced myself by explaining to Demis I'd read a lot of his research papers and sort of quoting them to him, which I think led to him tolerating my interest as a journalist. And I pitched him and I did a lengthy interview a few months later. And I asked him what he thought should ultimately be done with AI technology if we succeeded in building the sorts of powerful things which were then being imagined.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I had no illusions about my chances of making it as a fiction writer, of short stories in the mid-2000s. I wanted to be a journalist because I was obsessed with technology and studying it and writing about it. I felt like the most important story in the world was what was happening even back then with things like data centers and the build out of them. I became a technology journalist in 2009. And I remember, you know, I was reading papers about databases that were being used by Google to train machine learning models. I remember talking to the people that made that software that you click on that shows you're not a bot on Google where it says click all the bicycles. I interviewed him in 2009 and I said this is very interesting. When are you getting bought by Google? And they were bought by Google three months later.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “But it was because I was just already at a young age very obsessed with technology and what it meant. What I spent my time reading and writing about at university was what kind of stories can be told grappling with the implications of technology and how do you make it interesting because technology breaks a lot of narrative”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So I'd been reading science fiction from when I was about the age of 11 or so, and I'd always been very interested in studying different parts of science from how ant colonies worked to, I briefly wanted to be a town planner, so reading about cities and trying to model out cities with very basic computer programs to fractals and everything else. And I have this memory of when I was about 14 writing a story in which ants simulated in a supercomputer eventually tried to bootstrap their way out of a simulation by building like an AI to break from out. And then I read a story by the writer Greg Egan called Which is about crabs in a computer building technology to break from Alf. And I was like, damn it, he's done it too.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I studied literature and creative writing, which was a bit of a curveball because in school I did very well on the sciences and I got degrades in English. So obviously I was like, you know what this is telling me? I'm going to make my fortune with creative writing and studying literature. But I'd always been a huge reader. And I was very interested in going and getting an education, which was actually very much oriented around self-study and reading and grappling with ideas through the form of fiction, which is my main hobby and always has been.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think my credentials are pretty good here. I mean, I grew up in Brighton. My mother was a nurse. My dad was a grumpy guy from South Shields who had become a copywriter and went to state school, primary, secondary college, and then I went to the University of East Anglia. So I've been English and being reigned on for my formative years.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “If everyone gets access to it, you're now rolling a whole bunch of loaded dice with the lives of people around the planet. We have to somehow force a larger conversation on what do we want to do with this technology and how do we want it to be developed.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “We're entering an era where you actually need to do serious coordination, including between governments, to keep having all gas no brakes. It's not sustainable to keep this going.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The world we're in is one where AI companies are building the equivalent of nuclear power plants, and we just had our first case where when we upgrade the plant, a nuclear bomb also falls out of it. You say, uh-oh, this has some implications.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source