Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
Dario Amodei thinks we are just a few years away from AGI — or as he puts it, from having “a country of geniuses in a data center”. In this episode, we discuss what to make of the scaling hypothesis in the current RL regime, why task-specific RL might lead to generalization, and how AI will diffuse throughout the economy. We also dive into Anthropic’s revenue projections, compute commitments, path to profitability, and more.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) - What exactly are we scaling?
(00:12:36) - Is diffusion cope?
(00:29:42) - Is continual learning necessary?
(00:46:20) - If AGI is imminent, why not buy more compute?
(00:58:49) - How will AI labs actually make profit?
(01:31:19) - Will regulations destroy the boons of AGI?
(01:47:41) - Why can’t China and America both have a country of geniuses in a datacenter?
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: AI's Potential, OpenAI Rivalry, GenAI Business, Doomerism
Dario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a raw, unfiltered conversation about AI's potential, its stakes, and the source of his outspokenness. The interview is part of a major Big Technology profile about Amodei, ft. interviews with more than two dozen of his colleagues, friends, and critics. You can read that story for free here: https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/the-making-of-dario-amodei
We also cover Mark Zuckerberg's AI talent spending spree, Amodei's rivalry with OpenAI, his response to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's criticism, the state of the AI scaling laws, and whether there's a risk we'll lose control of the technology.
Tune in for a candid, emotional, and high energy conversation with one of the leaders driving the AI wave today.
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Anthropic’s C.E.O. Dario Amodei on Surviving the A.I. Endgame
This week, Anthropic’s C.E.O., Dario Amodei, returns to the show for a candid, wide-ranging interview. We discuss Anthropic’s brand-new Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, the A.I. arms race against China, and his hopes and fears for this technology over the next two years. Then, we gather up recent tech stories, put them into a hat and close out the week with a round of HatGPT.
Guest:
Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic
Additional Reading:
Inside the White-Hot Center of A.I. Doomerism
Machines of Loving Grace
Apple Removes Cloud Encryption Feature From U.K. After Backdoor Order
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#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Dario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic, the company that created Claude. Amanda Askell is an AI researcher working on Claude’s character and personality. Chris Olah is an AI researcher working on mechanistic interpretability.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep452-sc
See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
Transcript:
https://lexfridman.com/dario-amodei-transcript
CONTACT LEX:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Claude: https://claude.ai
Anthropic’s X: https://x.com/AnthropicAI
Anthropic’s Website: https://anthropic.com
Dario’s X: https://x.com/DarioAmodei
Dario’s Website: https://darioamodei.com
Machines of Loving Grace (Essay): https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace
Chris’s X: https://x.com/ch402
Chris’s Blog: https://colah.github.io
Amanda’s X: https://x.com/AmandaAskell
Amanda’s Website: https://askell.io
SPONSORS:
To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts:
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(10:19) – Scaling laws
(19:25) – Limits of LLM scaling
(27:51) – Competition with OpenAI, Google, xAI, Meta
(33:14) – Claude
(36:50) – Opus 3.5
(41:36) – Sonnet 3.5
(44:56) – Claude 4.0
(49:07) – Criticism of Claude
(1:01:54) – AI Safety Levels
(1:12:42) – ASL-3 and ASL-4
(1:16:46) – Computer use
(1:26:41) – Government regulation of AI
(1:45:30) – Hiring a great team
(1:54:19) – Post-training
(1:59:45) – Constitutional AI
(2:05:11) – Machines of Loving Grace
(2:24:17) – AGI timeline
(2:36:52) – Programming
(2:43:52) – Meaning of life
(2:49:58) – Amanda Askell – Philosophy
(2:52:26) – Programming advice for non-technical people
(2:56:15) – Talking to Claude
(3:12:47) – Prompt engineering
(3:21:21) – Post-training
(3:26:00) – Constitutional AI
(3:30:53) – System prompts
(3:37:00) – Is Claude getting dumber?
(3:49:02) – Character training
(3:50:01) – Nature of truth
(3:54:38) – Optimal rate of failure
(4:01:49) – AI consciousness
(4:16:20) – AGI
(4:24:58) – Chris Olah – Mechanistic Interpretability
(4:29:49) – Features, Circuits, Universality
(4:47:23) – Superposition
(4:58:22) – Monosemanticity
(5:05:14) – Scaling Monosemanticity
(5:14:02) – Macroscopic behavior of neural networks
(5:18:56) – Beauty of neural networks
EP 82: Dario Amodei’s (CEO, Anthropic) AI Predictions Through 2030
Dario Amodei is the Co-Founder and CEO of Anthropic. In the episode, we discuss detailed predictions on the AI industry for 2024, 2025, and beyond. Dario discusses his days at OpenAI, leaving to start Anthropic, why he doesn’t like the term AGI, what AI developments he’s most excited about right now, and much more. Overall, an enlightening conversation for anyone interested in the future of AI.
(0:00) Intro
(1:20) Joining OpenAI
(14:31) Are scaling and AI safety intertwined?
(20:31) Anthropic Early Days
(24:04) Amazon's Investment in Anthropic
(24:19) FTX investment in Anthropic
(25:50) Anthropic's Business Today
(30:51) Dario's Advice For Builders
(34:26) Should we pause AI progress?
(36:27) Future of AI
(37:55) Dario's Biggest AI Safety Concerns
(44:57) How Anthropic Deals With AI Bias
(49:29) Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy
(56:36) Testifying in front of Congress
(59:25) Will AI destroy humanity?
(1:00:00) GPT3 vs GPT4
(1:02:26) The memification of a CEO
(1:09:30) What are you most surprised by with AI?
(1:17:03) Why don't you like the term AGI?
(1:21:50) 2024 AI Predictions
(1:33:45) Dario's opinion on open-source models
(1:38:03) Probability of AI Catastrophe
(1:40:52) Misuse of AI
(1:44:44) Looking ahead: Dario's optimistic outlook on AI
For more long-form content with leading voices in AI, check out Redpoint's AI podcast, Unsupervised Learning:
https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/unsupervised-learning/id1672188924
https://open.spotify.com/show/1ILHVeQ1jbI3pClQiy8oN6?si=05427b08875345db
Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky
Produced: Rashad Assir
Executive Producer: Josh Machiz
Music: Griff Lawson
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About the Show
Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.
Executive Producer: Rashad Assir
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Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA
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About the Show
Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member.
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Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) — The hidden pattern behind every AI breakthrough
Here is my conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.
Dario is hilarious and has fascinating takes on what these models are doing, why they scale so well, and what it will take to align them.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Introduction
(00:01:00) - Scaling
(00:15:46) - Language
(00:22:58) - Economic Usefulness
(00:38:05) - Bioterrorism
(00:43:35) - Cybersecurity
(00:47:19) - Alignment & mechanistic interpretability
(00:57:43) - Does alignment research require scale?
(01:05:30) - Misuse vs misalignment
(01:09:06) - What if AI goes well?
(01:11:05) - China
(01:15:11) - How to think about alignment
(01:31:31) - Is modern security good enough?
(01:36:09) - Inefficiencies in training
(01:45:53) - Anthropic’s Long Term Benefit Trust
(01:51:18) - Is Claude conscious?
(01:56:14) - Keeping a low profile
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Dario Amodei, C.E.O. of Anthropic, on the Paradoxes of A.I. Safety and Netflix’s ‘Deep Fake Love’
Dario Amodei has been anxious about A.I. since before it was cool to be anxious about A.I. After a few years working at OpenAI, he decided to do something about that anxiety. The result was Claude: an A.I.-powered chatbot built by Anthropic, Mr. Amodei’s A.I. start-up.
Today, Mr. Amodei joins Kevin and Casey to talk about A.I. anxiety and why it’s so difficult to build A.I. safely.
Plus, we watched Netflix’s “Deep Fake Love.”
Today’s Guest:
Dario Amodei is the chief executive of Anthropic, a safety-focused A.I. start-up
Additional Reading:
Kevin spent several weeks at Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters. Read about his experience here.
Claude is Anthropic’s safety-focused chatbot.
Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.
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AI Robustness and Safety with Dario Amodei - TWiML Talk #75
The show is part of a series that I’m really excited about, in part because I’ve been working to bring them to you for quite a while now. The focus of the series is a sampling of the interesting work being done over at OpenAI, the independent AI research lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others. In this episode i'm joined by Dario Amodei, Team Lead for Safety Research at OpenAI. While in San Francisco a few months ago, I spent some time at the OpenAI office, during which I sat down with Dario to chat about the work happening at OpenAI around AI safety. Dario and I dive into the two areas of AI safety that he and his team are focused on--robustness and alignment. We also touch on his research with the Google DeepMind team, the OpenAI Universe tool, and how human interactions can be incorporated into reinforcement learning models. This was a great conversation, and along with the other shows in this series, this is a nerd alert show! To find the notes for this show, visit twimlai.com/talk/75 For more info on this series, visit twimlai.com/openai
