Anthropic's Co-Founder and Top Economist on Doing Research at the AI Frontier
There’s a lot to unpack with AI right now — everything from its potential impacts on the labor market and society to more extreme questions about existential risk. Anthropic, which builds frontier models like Mythos, Fable, and Claude, is actively grappling with these issues, including whether governments should limit AI development. Just last week, the Trump administration forced Anthropic to block foreign access to its two leading models. In this episode, we speak with Jack Clark (co-founder and head of public benefit) and Peter McCrory (head economist) about how Anthropic approaches safety and economic risks. We talk about its preparations for recursive self-improvement, the engineers it's hiring now, and why Jack left Bloomberg to enter the early AI industry.
Read more:
Anthropic Lays Out Vision for How to Bolster AI Models’ Safety
Microsoft Makes Big AI Inroads in China by Selling OpenAI Models
Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots
Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter
Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Ezra Klein Show: How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy?
The “Hard Fork” team is off this week, taking a much-needed break. While we’re away, we wanted to draw your attention to a recent episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.”
In this conversation, Ezra speaks with Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, about how he is using A.I. agents; how the technology is leading to meaningful changes in the ways we work and think; and how policy can or must change to anticipate potential job displacement on the horizon.
We’ll be back with a new episode next week.
Guest:
Jack Clark, a co-founder and the head of policy at Anthropic.
Additional Reading:
A full transcript and video of this episode can be found here.
We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Implications of AI on the Global Balance of Power with Alex Wang, Andrew Ng, Jack Clark and Cory Booker
Tune in to today's special episode airing a recent panel with the founders of Scale AI, Anthropic, and AI Fund who gathered in Washington DC to discuss China as an adversary. They argue that the papers out of Tsinghua University are just as impressive as those coming out of American universities. China is just as creative, but maybe even more motivated. While discussions of regulations have encompassed certain restraints, Alex Wang, Andrew Ng, and Jack Clark argue that we’re not moving fast enough (moderated by US senator Cory Booker).
This session was recorded live at The Hill & Valley Forum in 2024, a private bipartisan community of lawmakers and innovators committed to harnessing the power of technology to address America's most pressing national security challenges. The Hill & Valley podcast is part of the Turpentine podcast network. Learn more: www.turpentine.co
🔥 Apply to join over 400 founders and Execs in the Turpentine Network: https://hmplogxqz0y.typeform.com/to/JCkphVqj
RECOMMENDED PODCAST - The Riff with Byrne Hobart
Byrne Hobart, the writer of The Diff, is revered in Silicon Valley. You can get an hour with him each week. See for yourself how his thinking can upgrade yours.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6rANlV54GCARLgMOtpkzKt
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-riff-with-byrne-hobart-and-erik-torenberg/id1716646486
SPONSORS:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive
The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR
Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to https://choosesquad.com/ and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off https://www.omneky.com/
CHAPTERS:
(00:00) Intro
(03:29) Assembling the founders of Anthropic, Scale AI, and AI Fund
(04:45) Predictions for AGI
(08:21) Navigating AI innovation amidst regulation
(16:15) Global AI competition and the urgency of Innovation
(24:34) Empowering future generations
Anthropic's Co-Founder on AI Agents, General Intelligence, and Sentience — With Jack Clark
Jack Clark is the co-founder of Anthropic and author of Import AI. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a mega episode on Anthropic and the future of AI. We cover: 1) What Anthropic and other LLM providers are building towards 2) What AI agents will look like 3) What type of traning is neccesary to get to the next level 4) What AI 'general intelligence' 5) AI memory 6) Anthropic's partnerships with Google and Amazon 7) The broader AI business case 8) The AI chips battle 9) Why Clark and others from OpenAI founded Anthropic 10) Is Anthropic an effective altruism front organization? 11) The risk that AI kills us 12) The risk that AI takes our jobs 13) What regulation would help keep AI safe? 14) Is AI regulation just a front for keeping the small guy down 15) LLMs' ability to persuade
---
Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/
Want a discount for Big Technology Premium? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology
Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jack Clark — Building Trustworthy AI Systems
Jack Clark is the Strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI and formerly worked as the world’s only neural network reporter at Bloomberg. Lukas and Jack discuss AI policy, ethics, and the responsibilities of AI researchers.
Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims by OpenAI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07213
Follow Jack Clark on Twitter: twitter.com/jackclarkSF
Read more posts by Jack on his website: https://jack-clark.net/
Get our podcast on Apple and Spotify!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gradient-dissent-weights-biases/id1504567418
https://open.spotify.com/show/7o9r3fFig3MhTJwehXDbXm
🤖Gradient Dissent by Weights and Biases
Get a behind-the-scenes look at how industry leaders are using machine learning in the real world. While building experiment tracking tools, we’ve had the opportunity to learn about how different teams are building and deploying models. In this podcast, we share some of the insights and stories we’ve heard along the way. Follow Gradient Dissent for weekly machine learning updates, and be part of the conversation.
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/
Episode 2 demo - Jack Clark
In Episode 2 of Eye on AI, I talk to Jack Clark, Strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI, a nonprofit A.I. research company, in a wide-ranging conversation off of things highlighted in Jack's popular Import AI newsletter. Topics include whether A.I. will be used to trade cryptocurrencies; about A.I. used to speed up the creation of A.I. systems and how long will it be before A.I. does it all; evolution strategies as an alternative to reinforcement learning; the great global divide between 'low compute' and 'high compute' camps, with only a handful of companies and nation states controlling the bulk of the computing power; and when will the A.I. healthcare revolution finally begin as well as what does A.I. see when it looks at our tongues.
Episode 1 demo - Jack Clark
In Episode 1 of Eye on AI, I talk to Jack Clark, Strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI, a nonprofit A.I. research company, in a wide-ranging conversation off of things highlighted in Jack's popular Import AI newsletter. Topics include Google CEO Sundar Pichai's comment that the advent of artificial intelligence to man's discovery of fire; the chances that the world's nation states can create and adhere to international norms governing A.I., preventing the spread of dangerous applications of the powerful technology; whether A.I. is escaping the labs of the tech giants and becoming more democratic; and whether A.I. eventually become a cognitive mirror to our own minds.
