Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Podcast

Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"

28d ago2:22:2028,191 words
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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 i...

Transcript

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We talked three years ago.

What has been the biggest difference between what I felt like last three years versus now?

Yeah, I would say actually the underlying technology like the exponential of the technology has has gone Broadly speaking I would say about about as I expected it to go. I mean there's like plus or minus you know a couple There's plus or minus a year or two here. There's plus or minus a year or two there. I don't know that I would predicted the specific direction of code But but actually when I look at the exponential it is Roughly what I expected in terms of the march or the models from like you know smart high school student to smart college student to like

You know beginning to do PhD and professional stuff and in the case of code reaching beyond that so you know the frontier is a little bit uneven It's roughly what I expected I will tell you though what the most surprising thing has been the most surprising thing has been the lack of public recognition of How close we are to the end the exponential to me. It is absolutely wild that you know you have People you know within the bubble and outside the bubble you know, but you have people talking about these

These you know just the same tired old hot button political issues and like you know or around us We're like here at the end of the exponential. I want to understand what that exponential looks like right now

Because the first question I asked you when we recorded three years ago was you know what's up at scaling

How it might as a work and I'm a similar question now But I feel like it's a more complicated question because at least from the public's point of view Yes three years ago there were these you know well known public trends where across many rivers of magnitude of compute You can see how the loss improves and now we have our all scaling and there's no publicly known scaling law for it It's not even clear what exactly the story is of is this supposed to be teaching the model skills

It's supposed to be teaching metal learning What is the scaling hypothesis at this point? Yeah, so so I have actually the same hypothesis that I had Even all the way back in 2017 so in 2017

I think I talked about it last time, but I wrote a doc called the the big blob of compute hypothesis and

And you know, it wasn't about the scaling of language models in particular when I when I wrote it GPT one had had just come out right so that was you know one among many things right there was Back in those days, there was robotics people tried to work on reasonably as a separate thing from language models There was scaling of the kind of RL that happened that you know kind of happened in alpha go and You know that that happened it doted at open AI and

You know People remember starcraft at deep mind, you know the alpha star So it was written as a more general document and and the specific thing I said was the following that and you know It's it's very you know, we're starting to put out the bit bitter less than a couple years later

But you know that the hypothesis is is basically the same so so what it says is

All the cleverness all the techniques all all the kind of we need a new method to to do something like that

Doesn't matter very much. There are only a few things that matter and I think I listed seven of them one is like

How much raw compute you have the other is the quantity of data that you have Then the third is kind of the quality and distribution of data right it needs to be a broad broad distribution of data The fourth is I think how long you train for The fifth is you need an objective function that can scale to the moon So the pre-training objective function is one such objective function right another objective function is

You know the the kind of RL objective function that says like you have a goal You're going to go out and reach the goal within that of course. There's objective rewards like you know like you see in math and coding And there's more subjective rewards like you see in RL from human feedback or kind of higher order Higher order of versions of that and and then the sixth and seventh were things around kind of like Normalization or conditioning like you know just getting the numerical stability so that kind of the big blob of compute

Flows in this laminar way instead of instead of running into problems so that was the hypothesis and it's hypothesis I still hold I don't think I've seen very much that is not in line with that hypothesis and so the pre-training Scaling laws were one example of of of of kind of what we see there and indeed

Those have continued going like you know, you know, you know, I think I think now it's been it's been widely reported like you know

We feel good about pre-training like pre-training is continuing to give us games What has changed is that now? We're also seeing the same thing for RL right so we're seeing a pre-training phase and then we're seeing like an RL phase on top of that And with RL it's it's actually just the same like you know even even other companies have have published um Like um you know in some of their in some of their releases have published things that say look you know

We train the model on math contests, you know AIME or or the kind of other th...

How well how well the model does is log linear and how long we've trained it and we see that as well And it's not just math content. It's a wide variety of RL tasks and so we're seeing the same scaling in RL that we saw for pre-training You mentioned which which are sudden and a bit of a lesson. Yeah, I interviewed him last year and he is actually Very non LL unpilled and if I'm if I I don't know if this is perspective, but one way to pair a phrase

This objection is something like look Something which possesses the true core of human learning would not require All these billions of dollars of data and compute and these bespoke environments to learn how to Use Excel or how it is in a you know how to how to use powerpoint how to navigate a web browser and the fact that we have to build in these skills Using these are all environments hints that we're actually lacking this core human

Learning algorithm and so we're scaling the wrong thing and so yeah That is really the question why are we doing all this RL scaling if we do think there's something that's gonna be human

Like and it's a bit of a learn on the fly. Yeah, yeah, so I think I think this kind of puts together

Several things that should be kind of thought of thought of differently. Yeah, I think there is a genuine puzzle here But it may not matter Um, in fact, I would guess it probably it probably doesn't matter so Let's take the RL out of it for a second because I actually think RL and it's a red hearing to say that RL was any different from pre-training in this matter So if we if we look at pre-training scaling, um, it was very interesting back in you know 2017 when Alec Radford was doing

GPT1 if you look at the models before GPT1 they were trained on these data sets that didn't represent a wide You know Distribution of text right you had like you know these very standard, you know Kind of language modeling benchmarks and GPT1 itself was trained on a bunch of I think it was fanfiction Actually um, but you know it was it was like literary you know it's like literary text which is a very small fraction of the text that you get

And what we found with that you know and in those days it was like a billion words or something so small data sets and

Represented a pretty narrow distribution right like a narrow distribution of kind of what what you can see what you can see in the world and it didn't generalize well if you did better on You know the the you know If I forgot what but some some kind of fanfiction corpus um, it wouldn't generalize that well to kind of the other tab You know we had all these measures of like you know how well does the how well does a model do it predicting all of these other kinds of texts You really didn't see the generalization

It was only when you trained over all the tasks on the you know the internet when you when you kind of did a general internet scrape right from something like You know Common crawl or scraping links and read it which is what we did for GPT 2. It's only when you do that that you kind of started to get generalization

Um, and I think we're seeing the same thing on RL that we're starting with

First very simple RL tasks like training on math competitions

Then we're kind of moving to you know kind of broader broader training that involves things like code as a task And now we're moving to do kind of many many other tasks and then I think we're going to increasingly get Generalization so that that kind of takes out the RL versus the pre-training side of it But I think there is a puzzle here either way which is that on pre-training when we train the model on Pre-training you know we use like trillions of tokens right and and humans don't see trillions of words

So there is an actual sample efficiency difference here there there is actually something different That's that's happening here, which is that the model start from scratch and you know they have to get Much more much more training, but we also see that once they're trained if we give them a long context length

They only think blocking a long context length is like inference, but if we give them like a context length of a million

They're very good at learning in the adapting within that context length and and so I don't know the full answer to this

But but I think there's something going on that pre-training

It's it's not like the process of humans learning it's somewhere between the process of humans learning and the process of human Evolution. It's like it's somewhere between like we get many of our priors from evolution our brain isn't just a blank slate Right books have been written about I think the language models. They're much more blank slate They literally start as like random weights Whereas the human brain starts with all these regions. It's connected to all these inputs and outputs

And and so maybe we should think of pre-training and for that matter RL as well as as being something that exists in the middle space Between human evolution and you know kind of human on on the spot learning and as the in context learning that the models do

As as something between long-term human learning and short-term human learnin...

There's this hierarchy of like there's evolution. There's long-term learning. They're short-term learning and there's just human reaction and

The LOM phases exist along the spectrum but not necessarily exactly at the same points that there's no analog to some of the human modes of learning

The LOMs are kind of falling between the points. Does that make sense?

Yes, although some things are still a bit confusing for example If the analogy is that this is like evolution so it's fine that it's not that's apple efficient then like well If we're going to get the kind of super sample efficient Asian from in context learning why are we bothering to build in You know there's our environment companies which are it seems like what they're doing is they're teaching at how to use this API How to use Slack how to use whatever it's confusing to me why there's so much emphasis on that

If the kind of Asian that can just learn on the fly is emerging where is going to soon emerge or has already Yeah, so I mean I can't speak for the emphasis to anyone else. I can only talk about how we how we think about it I think the way we think about it is The goal is not to teach the model every possible skill within our all just as we don't do that within pre training right within pre training We're not trying to expose the model to you know

Every every possible you know way that words could be put together right you know It's it's rather that the model trains on a lot of things and then and then it reaches generalization across pre training Right that was that was the transition from GPT1 to GPT2 that I saw up close which is like You know the the model reaches a point, you know I like had these moments where I was like oh, yeah, you just give the model like you just give the model a list of numbers that's like, you know

You know, this is the cost of the house. This is the square feet of the house and the model completes the

Pattern and does linear regression like not great, but it does it, but it's never seen that exact thing before and and so

You know to to the extent that we are building these RL environments The goal is is very similar to what is be you know to what was done five or 10 years ago with pre training with We're trying to get a we're trying to get a whole bunch of data not because we want to cover a

Specific document or a specific skill, but because we want to generalize. I mean I I think the

Framework you're laying down obviously makes sense like we're making progress for a CGI I think the crux is something like Nobody at this point disagrees that we're going to achieve AGI in the century and the crux is you say we're hitting the end of the exponential And Somebody else looks at this and says oh, yeah, we're making progress. We've been making progress in 2012 and then 2035 will have a human like agent and so I want to understand

What it is that you're seeing which makes you think Yeah, obviously we're seeing the kinds of things that evolution did or that human within human lifetime learning is like in the these models and why think that it's One year away and not ten years away. Yeah, I actually think of it as like two There's kind of two cases to be made here are like two two claims you could make one of which is like Stronger and the other of which is weaker. So I think starting starting with the weaker claim

You know when when I first

Saw the scaling back in like you know 2019 You know I wasn't sure you know this was the the whole this was kind of a 50/50 thing right I thought I saw something that was you know And and my claim was this is much more likely than anyone thinks it is like this is wild No one else would even consider this maybe there's a 50% chance this happens On the basic hypothesis of you know as you put it within ten years will get to you know

You know what I call kind of country of geniuses at a data center I'm at like 90% on that I mean it's hard to go much higher than 90% because the world is so unpredictable. Yeah Maybe the irreducible uncertainty would be if we were at 95% where you get to things like I don't know maybe multiple you know multiple companies have you know

Kind of internal turmoil and nothing happens and then Taiwan gets invaded and like all of all the Fabs get blown up by missiles and and you know and then now you would make the scenario You know just you could construct a scenario where there's like a 5% chance that it Or you know you can construct a 5% world where like things things get delayed for for for for for 10 years That's maybe 5% there's another 5% which is that I'm very confident on tasks that can be verified

So I think I think with coding

I'm just except for that irreducible uncertainty. There's just there's I mean I think it'll be there on one or two years

There's no way we will not be there in 10 years in terms of being able to do it end to end coding my one little bit the one little bit of Fundamental uncertainty even on long time scales is this thing about Tests that aren't verifiable like planning a mission to Mars like

Doing some fundamental scientific discovery like like CRISPR like you know wr...

Hard to hard to verify those tasks. I am almost certain that

We have a reliable path to get there but like If there was a little bit uncertainty it's there so so so so so so so on the 10 years I'm like you know 90% which is about a certain as you can be like I think it's I think it's crazy To say that this won't happen by by by 2035 like in some same world it would be outside the mainstream

But but the emphasis on Verification hints to me as a lack of a lack of Belief that these models was generalized if you think about humans. Yeah, you're better things that both which we get

Verifiable reward and things which we don't you're like you have to sorry the don't know. This is this is why I'm

I'm sure we already see substantial generalization from things that that verify to things that don't We're already seen right, but it seems like you were emphasizing this as a spectrum which will Split apart which maybe more progress and I'm like but that's a doesn't seem like how humans get world in which we don't make it or or the world in which we don't get there Is the world in which we do we do all the things that are that are verifiable and then they like

You know many of them generalize, but what we kind of don't get fully there. We don't we don't we don't fully You know, we don't fully color in this side of the box It's it's it's not it's not a binary thing but but it also seems to me as an even even if even in the world Generalization is weak when you only say to verify what domains it's not clear to me in such a world you could Automate software engineering because software like in some sense you are

What I'm quote a software engineer yeah, but you part of being a software engineer for you involves writing these like long memos about your Grand vision about different things and so I don't think that's part of the job of sweet That's part that's part of the job of the company, but I do think sweet involved like design documents Right, other things like that Which by the way that the models are not bad. They're already pretty good at writing comments are and so with with again

I again I'm making like much weaker claims here than I believe to like you know to to to kind of set up a

You know to distinguish between two things like we're we're Already almost there for software engineering. We are already almost there by what metric there's one metric Which is like how many lines of code are written by A and if you use if you consider other productivity improvements in the course of the history of it Software engineering compilers write all the lines of software and but we there's a difference between how many lines are written and how big the productivity Improvement is oh yeah, and then like we're almost there meaning like the how big is the productivity improvement

Not just how many lines are it. Yeah. Yeah, so so I actually Actually, I actually agree with you on this so I I've made this series of predictions on Code and software engineering and and and and I think people have repeatedly and kind of misunderstood them so so let me let me let me let me let me lay out the spectrum right like I think it was like you know Like you know a eight or nine months ago or something. I said, you know

They I model will be writing 90 90 percent of the lines of code in like you know three to six months

Which which happened at least at some places right happen to happen to at and drop it happen with many people Downstream using our models, but but that's actually a very weak criterion right people thought I was saying like We won't need 90 percent of the software engineers those things are worlds apart right like I would put the spectrum as 90 percent of code is written by the model 100 percent of code is written by the model and that's a big difference in productivity

90 percent of the end to end sweet tasks right including things like Compiling including things like setting up clusters and Environments testing features writing memos 90 percent of the sweet Tasker written by the models 100 percent of today's sweet tasks are are written by the models and And even when when when they happen doesn't mean software engineers are out of a job like

There's like new higher level things they can do where they can they can manage and then there's a further down the spectrum like

You know, there's 90 percent less demand for trees which I think will happen but like

This this this is a spectrum and you know, I wrote it about it in in the adolescents of Technology where I went through this kind of spectrum with farming And so I actually totally agree with you on that it's just these are very different benchmarks from each other But we're proceeding through them super fast. It seems like in part of your vision. It's like going from 90 to a hundred First it's gonna happen fast and to

That somehow that leads to huge Productivity improvements Whereas when I notice even in green fuel products if people start with cloud code or something People report starting a lot of projects and I'm like do we see in the world out there Of Renaissance of software all these new features that wouldn't exist otherwise and at least so far

It doesn't seem like we see that and so that doesn't make me wonder even if even if like I'd never had to intervene on cloud code

There is this thing like there's just The world is complicated jobs are complicated and Closing the loop on self-contained systems whether it's just writing software or something

How much sort of how much broader gains?

David our estimation of the country of genius is well, I actually I like I like simultaneously

I simultaneously agree with you agree that it's a reason why these things don't happen instantly

But at the same time I think the the effect is gonna be very fast so like I don't know you could have these two polls right one is like

You know AI is like you know, it's not gonna make progress It's slow like it's gonna take you know kind of forever to diffuse within the economy right economic diffusion has become one of these buzzwords That's like a reason why we're not gonna make AI progress or why AI progress doesn't matter and and you know the other Access is like we'll get recursive self-improvement you know the whole thing you know can't you just draw an exponential line on the on the curve You know it's it's good. We're gonna have you know Dyson spheres around the sun and like you know

You know so many nanoseconds after you know after after we get recursive I mean I'm completely caricaturing the view here, but like you know there there are these two is extremes But what we've seen From from the beginning you know at least if you look within endropic there's this bizarre

10x per year growth and revenue that we've seen right so you know in 2023 it was like 0 to 100 million

2024 it was a hundred million to a billion 2025 it was a billion to like nine or 10 billion and Then yeah, it's just about like a billion dollars with your own products. So you can just like have a clean 10 And the first month of this year like that that exponential is can you would think it would slow down But it would like you know we we added another few billion to like you know

We added another few billion to revenue in

January and and so you know obviously that curve can't go on forever, right?

You know the GDP is only so large. I don't you know

I would even guess that it bends that it bends bend somewhat this year

But like that is like a fast curve, right? That's like that's like a really fast curve and I would bet it stays pretty fast even as the scale goes to the entire economy So like I think we should be thinking about this middle world where things are like Extremely fast but not instant where they take time because of economic diffusion Because of the need to close the loop because you know it's like this fiddly. Oh man

I have to do change management within my enterprise. You know I have to like you know You know, I like I set this up, but but you know I have to change the security permissions on this in order to make it actually work or you know I had this like old piece of software that you know that like you know checks the model before it's compiled and and and like released And I have to rewrite it and yes the model can do that, but I have to tell the model to do that. It has to it has to take time to do that

And and and so I think everything we've seen so far is is compatible with the idea that there's one fast Exponential that's the capability of the model and then there's another fast exponential that's downstream of that Which is the diffusion of the model into the economy not instant Not slow much faster than any previous technology, but it has its limits and and and and this is what we You know when I when I look inside and drop it when I look at our customers

Fast adoption, but not infinitely fast Can I try a hot take on you? Yeah, I feel like diffusion is cope that people use to say when it's like

If the model isn't able to do something they're like oh, but the diffusion issue but then you should use the comparison to humans

You would think that the inherent advantages that AI's have would make Defusion a much easier problem for new AI's getting onboarded than new humans getting onboarded So an AI can read your entire slack in your drive in minutes They can share all the knowledge that the other copy other copies of the same instance have you don't have this adverse selection problem when you're hiring AI's who's been just higher copies of a vetted AI model

hiring a human is like so much more hassle and people hire humans all the time, right? We pay humans upwards of fifty trillion dollars in wages because they're useful Even though it's like In principle, it would be much easier to integrate AI's into the economy than it is to hire humans. I think like the diffusion I feel like Doesn't really explain I think diffusion is very real and and and and doesn't have to you know

Doesn't exclusively have to do with limitation limitation limitations on the AI models like again There are people who use diffusion to you know as kind of a buzzword to say this isn't a big deal I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about you know AI will diffuse at the speed that previous I think AI will diffuse much faster than previous technologies have but but not infinitely fast So I'll I'll just give an example of this right like there's like quad code like quad code is extremely easy to set up

You know if you're a developer you can kind of just start using quad code There is no reason why a developer at a large enterprise should not be adopting quad code as quickly as you know

Individual developer a developer to start up and we do everything we can to b...

We sell quad code to enterprises and big enterprises like you know big Big financial companies big pharmaceutical companies all of them they're adopting quad code Much faster than enterprises typically adopts new technology right but but again it like it It takes time like any given feature or any given product like quad code or like co-work We'll get adopted by the you know the individual developers who were on Twitter all the time by the like series a startups

many months faster than then you know that then they will get adopted by like you know Like large enterprise that does food sales

There are a number of factors like you have to go through legal you have to provision it for everyone

It has to you know like it has to pass security and compliance the leaders of the company who are further away from the I revolution you know are are forward looking but they have to say oh

It makes sense for us to spend 50 million. This is what this quad code thing is

This is why it helps our company This is why it makes us more productive and then they have to explain to the people to levels below and they have to say okay We have 3,000 developers like here's how we're gonna roll it out to our developers and we have conversations like this every day Like you know we are doing everything we can to make anthropics revenue grow 20 or 30x a year instead of 10x a year You know and and again, you know many enterprises are just saying this is so productive like you know

We're gonna take shortcuts and our usual procurement process, right? They're moving much faster They're you know when we try to sell them just the ordinary API which many of them use But quad code is a more compelling product But it's not an infinitely compelling product and I don't think even a GI or powerful AI or country of geniuses in the data center Will be an infinitely compelling product. It will be a compelling product enough

Maybe to get three or five or 10x a year growth even when you're in the hundreds of billions of dollars

Which is extremely hard to do and it's never been done in history before but not an infinitely fast

I buy that would be a slight slowdown and maybe this is not your claim But sometimes people talk about this like oh the capabilities are there but because of diffusion Otherwise like we're basically at a GI and then I don't believe we're basically at a GI

I think if you had the country geniuses in a data center if you were company to adopt the geniuses

The country geniuses in a data center we would know it right you would know if you had the country geniuses in a data center Like everyone in this room would know it everyone in Washington would know it like you know People in rural rural parts might not know but but but like But we would know it. We don't have that now. That's very clear as Daria was ending at to get generalization United train across a vibrating of realistic tasks and environments for example with a sales agent

The hardest part is in teaching you to mash buttons in a specific database in the sales force It's training the agent's judgment across ambiguous situations. How do you sort through a database with thousands of leads to figure out which ones are hot? How do you actually reach out? What do you do when you get ghosted when any I lab wanted to train a sales agent? Liberal box brought in dozens of Fortune 500 sales people to build a bunch of different oral environments

they created thousands of scenarios where the sales agent had to engage with the potential customer

Which was roleplayed by a second AI

Liberal box made sure that this customer AI had a few different personas because when you cold call, you have no idea who's going to be on the other end

You need to be able to deal with a whole range of possibilities

Liberal box's sales experts monitor these conversations turned by turn tweaking the roleplaying agent to ensure that the kinds of things and actual customer would do a little box could iterate faster than anybody else in the industry This is super important because oral is an empirical science. It's not a soft problem Liberal box has a bunch of tools for monitoring agent performance in real time This lets their experts keep coming up with tasks so that the model stays in the right decision and difficulty and gets the optimal reward signal during training

Liberal box can do this sort of thing and almost every dummy. They've got hedge fund managers radiologists even airline pilots So whatever you're working on, label box can help learn more at labelbox.com/vorkash Coming back to concrete predictions because I think because there's so many different things to disembuguate It can be easy to talk past each other when we're talking about capabilities

So for example, when I interviewed three years ago, I asked your prediction about what we should be expecting three years from now I think you were right. So when you said We should expect systems which if you talk them for the course of an hour It's hard to tell them apart from a generally well-educated human. Yes, I think you were right about that And I think spiritually I feel unsatisfied because my internal expectation was was that such a system could automate large parts of

White-collar work and so it might be more productive to talk about the actual And capabilities you want such a system. So so I will I will I will basically tell you what what you know

Where where I think we are so but let me let me ask you in a very specific qu...

Figure out exactly what kinds of capabilities we're just going to execute so maybe I'll ask about it in the context of a job

I understand well not because it's the most relevant job, but just because I can evaluate the claims about it Take video editors, right? I video editors and part of their job involves Learning about our audiences preferences learning about my preferences and taste and the different tradeoffs we have and how just over the course of many months Building up this understanding of context and so the skill and ability they have six months into the job a model They can pick up that skill on the job on the fly when should be expect such an AI system. Yeah

So I guess what you're talking about is like, you know We were we're doing this interview for three hours and then like, you know someone's going to come in someone's going to edit it They're going to be like oh, you know, you know, you know, I don't know. Dario like, you know Scratch his head and you know, we could we could edit that out and you know

That was just like long there was this like long discussion that like is less interesting to people and then then

You know, then there's other thing that's like more interesting to people so you know Let's let's let's kind of make this this edit so you know

I think the country geniuses in a data center will be able to do that

The way it will be able to do that is, you know, it will have general control of a computer screen, right? Like it, you know, and and you'll be able to feed this in and it'll be able to also use the computer screen to like go on the web Look at all your previous look at all your previous interviews like look at what people are saying on Twitter and response to your interviews like Talk to you ask you questions, talk to your staff look at the history of kind of edits edits that you did and from that like do the job

Yeah, so I think that's dependent on several things one that's dependent and and and and I think this is one of the things that's actually blocking deployment Getting to the point on computer use where the models are really masters at using the computer, right?

And you know, we've seen this climb in benchmarks and benchmarks are always you know imperfect measures, but like you know

OS world is you know went from you know like 5% a cut, you know like I think when we first really least you know a computer use like a year and a quarter ago was like maybe 15% I don't remember exactly But we've climbed from that to like 65 or 70% and and you know there may be harder measures as well

But but I think computer use has to pass a point of reliability. It just has a follow-up on that before you move in the next point

Um, I often for years I've been trying to build different internal LLM tools for myself and I often I have these Text-in text-out tasks which should be death center in the repertoire of these models and yet I still hire humans to do them Just because it's if it's something like make I didn't if I were the best clips would be in this transcript and maybe they'll do like a 7 out of 10 job at them But there's not this ongoing

way I can engage with them to help them get better at the job the way I could with a human employee and so that missing ability Even if you saw computer use with so block my ability to like Offload an actual job to them again there's there set this gets back to what we took to kind of what we were talking about before with Learning on the job where it's it's very interesting. You know, I think I think with the coding agents like I don't think people would say that Learning on the job is what is what is you know preventing the coding agents from like you know

Doing everything end-hand like they keep they keep getting better We have engineers and anthropic who like don't write any code and when I look at the productivity To your to your previous question, you know, we have folks who say this this GPU kernel this chip I used to write it myself. I just have clawed do it and so there's this there's this enormous improvement in productivity and I don't know like when I see clawed code like

familiarity with the code base or like You know or a feeling that the model hasn't worked at the company for for a year

That's not high up on the list of complaints I see and so I think what I'm saying is where we're like

We're kind of taking a different way. No, don't you think with coding that's because there is an external scaffold of memory Which exists instantiated in the code base, which I don't know how many other jobs have Coding made fast progress precise precisely because it has its unique Advantage that other economic activity doesn't but but when you say that what you're what you're implying is that by reading the code base into the context I have everything that the human needed to learn on the job

so that would be an example of whether it's Written or not whether it's available or not a case where everything you needed to know you got from the context window, right? And that and that what we think of as learning like oh man I started this job. It's gonna take me six months to understand the code base the model just did it in the context Yeah, I honestly don't know how to think about this because

There are people who qualitative report where you're saying There was a meter study, I'm sure you saw last year, yes, where they had experienced developers try to close

Polar Quest in repositories that they were familiar with and those developers reported and uplift

They reported that they felt more productive with the use of these models, bu...

There's a 20% downlift. They were less productive as a result of these models and so I'm trying to square the Qualitative feeling that people feel with these models versus One and a macro level where are all the where is this like Renaissance of software and and two when people do these independent evaluations Why are we not seeing the yeah, so private event if it's a bit to expect within anthropic This is just really unambiguous, right?

We're under an incredible amount of commercial pressure and making it even hard harder for ourselves

Because we have all this safety stuff we do that I think we do more than than than other companies so like the the

Pressure to survive economically while also keeping our values is is just incredible, right? We're trying to keep this 10x revenue curve going there's like there is zero time for bullshit There is zero time for feeling like we're productive when we're not like These tools make us a lot more productive like why why do you think we're concerned about Competitors using the tools because we think we're ahead of the competitors and like we don't

We don't want to sell we we we wouldn't be going through all this trouble if This was secretly reducing overducing our productivity like we see the end productivity every few months in the form of model launches like There's no kidding yourself about this like the models make you more productive One that people feeling like they're productive is qualitatively predicted by studies like this But to if I just look at the end output obviously you guys are making fast progress, but the fact you know the the idea

What's supposed to be with recursive some improvement is that you make a better AI the AI helps people the better next AI it's at that era and when I see instead if I look at the You open AI deep-mind is that people are just shifting around the podium every few months It maybe you think that stops because you you've won or whatever, but but what why are we not seeing the person with the best coding model have this Lasting advantage if in fact there are these enormous productivity gains from the last point of so no no

No, I mean, I mean, I mean, I think it's all like my my model. The situation is there's there's an advantage

That's gradually growing like I would say right now the coding models give maybe I don't know a a like 15 maybe 20% total factor speed up like that's my view and Six months ago, it was maybe five percent and so and so it didn't matter like five percent doesn't register It's now just getting to the point where it's like one of several factors that that kind of matters and and that's going to that's going to keep speeding up And so I think six months ago like you know

There were several there were several companies that were at roughly the same point because You know this this wasn't this wasn't an notable factor, but I think it started to speed up more and more You know, I would I would also say they're multiple companies that you know right models that are used for code and You know, we're not perfectly good at you know preventing some of these other companies from from from from from from kind of using our models internally So you know, I think I think everything we're kind of kind of everything we're seen is consistent with this kind of

This kind of snowball model where you know, there's no hard again My my my my my my my theme and all of this is like all of this is soft takeoff like soft Smooth exponentials although the exponentials are relatively steep and so and so we're seeing this snowball gather momentum

Where it's like 10 percent 20 percent 25 percent you know for for 40 percent and as you go

Yeah, and those all you have to get all of the like things that are preventing you from from closing the loop out of the way

But like this is one of the biggest priorities within end traffic It's a stepping back I think before in this deck we were talking about Well, when do we get this on the job learning and it seems like the coding the point you're making the coding thing is we actually don't need on the job learning That you can have tremendous productivity improvements. You can have potentially trillions of dollars of revenue for eye companies without this basic human ability

Maybe that's not going to make sure clarify But without this basic human ability to learn on the job, but I just will go and like in in most

Domains of economic activity people say I hired somebody they were in that useful for the first few months and then over time

They built up the context understanding. It's actually hard to define what we're talking about here But they got something and then now now they're their power horse and they're so valuable to us and If AI doesn't develop this ability to learn on the fly. I'm not I'm a bit skeptical that we're gonna see Huge changes to the world. Yeah, so I think I think I think I think two things here right there's the state of the technology right now Which is again? We have these two stages. We have the pre-training and RL stage where you throw

You throw a bunch of data and tasks into the models and then they generalize

It's like learning but it's like learning from more data and not you know

Not learning over kind of one human or one models life time. So again, this is situated between evolution and and and human learn

But once you learn all those skills, you have them and and just like with pre-training just how the models No more you know if if I look at a pre-trained model, you know, it knows more about the history of samurai in Japan than I do It knows more about baseball than I do it knows you know it knows more about you know low-pass filters in electronics then you know all all of these things

It's knowledge is way broader than mine. So I think I think even even just that

You know may get us to the point where the models are better at you know kind of better at everything and Then we also have again just with scaling the kind of existing set up We have the in-context learning which I would describe as kind of like human on the job learning But like a little weaker and a little short-term like you look at in-context learning

The you give them a bunch of examples. It does get it. There's real learning that happens in context and like a million tokens is a lot

That's that's you know that can be days if you in learning right you know if you think about the model You know, you know, kind of reading reading a million words, you know, it you know, it takes me how long would it take me to read a million I mean, you know like days or weeks at least So you have these two things and and I think these two these two things within the existing paradigm May just be enough to get you the country's new assistant data center

I don't know for sure, but I think they're gonna get you a large fraction of it

There may be gaps, but I certainly think just as things are this I believe is enough to generate Trillions of dollars are for having you. That's one. That's all one. Two is this idea of Continual learning this idea of a single model learning on the job I think we're working on that too and I think there's a good chance that in the next year or two We also make we also solve that

Again, I I You know, I think you get most of the way there without it. I think the Trillions of dollars of you know, but I think the trillions of dollars a year market Maybe all of the national security implications and the safety implications that I wrote about in that Alessence of technology can happen without it, but I I also think we and I imagine others are working on it

And I think there's a good chance that that you know that we get there within the next year or two There are a bunch of ideas. I won't go into all of them in detail But you know, one is just make the context longer. There's there's nothing preventing longer context from working You just have to train at longer context and then learn to to serve them at inference and both of those are engineering problems That we are working on and that I would assume others are working on as well

Yeah, so this context I think it seemed like there was a period from 2020 to 2023 where from GPD 3 to GPD 4 to wherever There was an increase from like 2000 context lying still one 28k if you're like for the next For the two-ish year since then we've been in the sameish ballpark. Yeah, and when model context lines get much longer than that People report qualitative degradation in the ability to the model to consider that full context So I'm curious what you're

Internally saying that makes you think like a 10 million context 100 million context to get human like six months learning billions

Building context isn't a research problem. This is a this is an engineering and inference problem

Right if you want to serve long context. You have to like store your entire KV cash you have to you know

You know, it's it's it's it's difficult to store all the memory in the GPUs to juggle the memory around I don't even know the detail you know At this point this is at a level of detail that that that that I'm no longer able to follow all the you know I knew it in the GP D3 era of like you know these are the weights these are the activations you have to store But you know, you know these days the whole thing is flip because we have MOE models and and and kind of all of that

But and this degradation you're talking about like again without getting too specific like a question I would ask is like there's two things. There's the context length you train at and there's a context length that you serve at If you train at a small context length and then try to serve at a long-contracts length like maybe you get these Accredations it's better than nothing you might still offer it, but you get these degradations and maybe it's harder to train at a long context length Yeah, so you know, there's there's a lot I want to at the same time ask about like maybe some rabbit holes of like

Well, what would interest spect that if you had to train on longer context length that would mean that You're able to get sort of like less samples in for the same amount of compute before maybe it's not worth diving deep on that I want to get an answer to the bigger picture question which is like okay, so I don't feel a preference for a human editor that's been working for me for six months versus any eye That's been working with me for six months

What year do you predict that that will be the case? I

My I mean, you know, my guess for that is you know

There's there's a lot of problems that are basically like we can do this when we have the country of geniuses in the data center

And so you know my my my my my my picture for that is You know again if you if you if you if you you know if you made me guess it's like one to two years Maybe one to three years. It's really hard to tell I have a I have a strong view

99 95% that like all this will happen in 10 years like that's I think that's just a super safe bet

Yeah, and then I have a hunch this is more like a 50 50 thing that it's gonna be more like one to two Maybe more like one to three so one to three years The country of geniuses And the slightly less economically valuable task of editing videos it seems pretty economically valuable Let me tell you it's just there are a lot of use cases like that right there are a lot of similar

Exactly, so you're predicting that within one to three years and In generally andthropic is predicted that by late 26 early 27 we will have a system that are quote Have the ability to navigate interfaces available to humans doing digital work today Intellectual capabilities mashing or exceeding that of noble prize winners and the ability to interface with the physical world And then you give an interview two months ago with dealbook where you're emphasizing your

Your companies more responsible compute scaling as compared to your competitors and I'm trying to square these two views where if you really Believe that we're gonna have a country of geniuses you you want as big a data center as you can get There's no reason to slow down the tan of a noble prize winner that is actually Can do everything in all parts when I can do it's like trillions of dollars and so I'm trying to square this conservatism

Which seems rational if you have more moderate timelines with your stated views about a progress?

Yeah, so so it actually all fits together and we go back to this fast But not infinitely fast diffusion so like let's say that we're making progress at this rate You know the the technology is making progress this fast again. I have you know very high conviction that like It's going you know the you know, you know, we're we're gonna get there within within within a few years I have a hunch that we're gonna get there within a year or two so a little uncertainty on the technical side

But like you know pretty pretty strong confidence that it won't be off by much What I'm less certain about is again the economic diffusion side like I Really do believe that we could have models that are a country of geniuses The country of geniuses in the data center in one to two years one question is how many years after that? Do the trillions and you know do do that do the trillions and revenue start

Rolling in I Don't think it's guaranteed that it's going to be immediate. Um, you know, I think it could be One year it could be two years I could even stretch it to five years. Although I'm like I'm skeptical of that And so we have this uncertainty, which is

Even if the technology goes as fast as I suspect that it will We don't know exactly how fast it's gonna drive revenue We we know it's coming but with the way you buy these data centers if you're off by a couple years that can be ruinous It is just like how I wrote you know in machines of loving grace

I said look I think we might get this powerful AI this country genius in the data center

That description you gave comes from the machines of loving grace I said we'll get that 206 maybe 207 again that is that is my hunch wouldn't be surprised if I'm off by a year or two But like that is my hunch Let's say that happens. That's the starting gun. How long does it take to cure all the disease? It's right that's that's one of the ways that like drives a huge amount of of of of economic value, right?

Like you cure you cure every disease You know there's a question of how much of that goes to the pharmaceutical company to the AI company But there's an enormous consumer surplus because everyone you know I mean we can get access for everyone which I care about greatly

We you know we cure all of these diseases. How long does it take you have to do the biological discovery?

You have to you know go you have to you know Man you've actually the new drug you have to you know go through the regulatory problem We saw this with like vaccines and COVID right like it that there's just this we we got the vaccine out to everyone But it took a year and a half right and and so my question is how long does it take to get the cure for everything?

Which AI is the genius that can in theory invent out to everyone? How long from one that AI first exists in the lab to when

The diseases have actually been cured for everyone right and and you know we had a polio vaccine for 50 years We're still trying to eradicate it in the most remote corners of Africa and you know the Gates Foundation is trying as hard as they can Others are trying as hard as they can but you know that's difficult Again, I you know I don't expect most of the economic diffusion to be as difficult as that right. That's like the most difficult case But but there's a there's a real dilemma here and and where I've settled on it is it will be it will be it will be

Faster than anything we've seen in the world

But it still has its limits and and so then when we go to buying data centers

You know you again again the curve. I'm looking at is

Okay, we you know we've had a 10x a year increase every year. So beginning of this year

We're looking at 10 billion in in in annual in you know rate of annualized revenue with the being in the year

We have to decide how much compute to buy and You know It takes a year or two to actually build out the data centers to reserve the data center. So basically I'm saying like in Twenty twenty seven how much compute do I get well I could assume that

the Revenue will continue growing 10x a year so it'll be one 100 billion at the end of twenty twenty six and one trillion at the end of twenty twenty seven and

So I could buy a trillion dollars actually would be like five trillion dollars of compute because it would be a

Trillion dollar a year for for five years, right? I could buy a trillion dollars of compute that starts at the end of Twenty twenty seven and if my if my revenue is not a trillion dollars if it's even

800 billion there's no force on earth

There's there's no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I if I buy that much compute and and so Even though a part of my brain wonders if it's gonna keep going 10x I can't buy a trillion dollars a year of compute in in in in in in in in in in in in in Twenty twenty seven if I'm just off by a year in that rate of growth or if the the growth rate is five x a year instead of 10x a year Then then you know the then you go bankrupt and and and so you end up in a world where you know

You're supporting hundreds of billions Not trillions and you accept you accept some risk that there's so much demand that you can't support the revenue and You accept still some risk that you know you got it wrong and it's still and so when I talked about behaving Responsibly what I meant actually was not the absolute amount that that actually was not You know, I think it is true we're spending somewhat less than some of the other players. It's actually the other things like

Have we been thoughtful about it or are we yoloing and saying oh we're gonna do a hundred billion dollars here or a hundred billion dollars there

I kind of get the impression that you know some of the other companies have not written down the spreadsheet That they don't really understand the risk they're taking they're just kind of doing stuff because it sounds cool um and We thought carefully about it right we're an enterprise business therefore You know we can rely more on revenue. It's less fickle than consumer

We have better margins, which is the buffer between buying too much and buying too little and so I think we bought an amount that allows us to capture Pretty strong upside worlds. It won't capture the full 10x a year And things would have to go pretty badly for us to be for us to be in financial trouble

So I think we thought carefully and we've made that balance and and that's what I mean when I say that we're being responsible

Okay, so it seems like It's possible that we actually just have different definitions as a country of a genius in a data center because when I think of like Actual human geniuses in actual country of human geniuses in the data center. I'm like I would happily buy five trillion dollars over the computer to run actual country of human geniuses in data center So let's say JP Morgan or Moderna or whatever it doesn't want to use them also

I've got a country of geniuses let's build those start their own company and if like they can't start their own company And they're bottleneck by clinical trials. It is worth stating with clinical trials like most clinical trials failed Because the drug doesn't work. There's not efficacy right and I make exactly that point in In machines of loving grace. I say the clinical trials are going to go much faster than we're used to But not not instantly not infinitely fast and then suppose it takes a year to

For the clinical trials to work out so that you're getting revenue from that and can make more drugs Okay, well, you've got a country of geniuses and you're an AI lab and you have you could use many more AI researchers And you also think there's these like self reinforcing gains from you know smart people working on AI tech So like okay, you can have that. That's right, but you can have the data center working on like AI progress. Is there more gains from buying Like substantially more gains from buying

A trillion dollars a year of compute versus 300 billion dollars a year of compute if you're competitors buying Australia and yes, there is Well, then no, there's some gain, but then but again, there's this chance that they go bankrupt before You know before again, if you're off by only a year you destroy yourselves. That's that that's the balance We're buying a lot. We're buying a hell of a lot like we're not we're you know we're buying an amount that's Comparable to that that you know that the biggest players in the game are buying

But but if you're asking me why why haven't we signed?

10 trillion of compute starting and starting in mid-2027 first of all can't b...

But but second What is the country of geniuses comes but it comes in mid-2028 instead of mid-2027 you go bankrupt so If your projection is one to three years

It seems like you should want 10 trillion dollars a compute by

Twenty 29 money 20 and maybe 2020 I made this like I mean, you know You know like it seems like even in your the longest version of the timelines you state The compute you are ramping up to build doesn't seem what what what makes you think that Well you as you said you want to win the 10 trillion like human wages let's say are On the order of 50 trillion a year if you look at so so I won't I won't talk about anthropic in particular

But if you talk about the industry like The amount of compute the industry here, you know the the amount of compute the industry is building This year is probably in the you know, I don't know very low tens of you know call it 10 15 gigawatts

Next year, I you know it goes up by roughly three x a year so like next year's third year 40 gigawatts and

2028 might be a hundred 2029 might be like 300 gigawatts and like each gigawatt costs like

Maybe 10 I mean I'm doing the math in my head but each gigawatt costs maybe 10 billion dollars, you know all four to 10 to 15 billion dollars a year

So, you know, you kind of you you know you put that all together and you're getting about about what you describe You're getting multiple trillions a year by 2028 at 2029 So you're you're getting exactly that you're getting you're getting exactly what you predict That's for the industry that's for the industry that's so suppose that Anthropics compute keeps three x a year and then by like 27 you have

or 2728 you have 10 gigawatts and like multiply that by as you say

10 billion so then it's like a hundred billion a year

But then you're saying the term by 2028 I don't want to give exact numbers for Anthropics, but but these numbers are too small these numbers are too small Okay interesting I'm really proud that the puzzles I've worked on with Jane Street have resulted in them hiring a bunch of people for my audience

Well, they're still hiring and they just sent me another puzzle for this one and they spent about 20,000 GPU hours

training backdoors into three different language models each one has a hidden prompt that elicits Completely different behavior you just have to find the trigger This is particularly cool because finding backdoors is actually an open question in front of your AI research Anthropics actually released a couple of papers about celebrations and they show that you can build a simple classifier on the residual stream to detect when a backdoor is about to fire

But they already knew what the triggers were because they built them You don't and it's not feasible to check the activations for all possible trigger phrases unlike the other puzzles they made for this podcast Jane Street isn't even sure this one is solvable But they've set aside $50,000 for the best attempts and write-ups The puzzles live at Jane Street.com/tworkash and they're accepting submissions until April 1st

All right back to Daria You've told investors that you plan to be profitable starting in 28 and this is the year We were like potentially getting the country of geniuses at data center and This is like gonna now unlock all this Progress and medicine and health and et cetera et cetera and new technologies

Wouldn't this be particularly the exactly the time where you'd like want to reinvest in the business and build bigger countries So they can be more disarrayable. I mean profit of profitability is this kind of like weird thing in this field I like like I don't think I don't think I don't think in this field profitability is actually a measure of

You know kind of spending down versus investing in the business like let's let's just let's just take a model of this I actually think profitability happens when you underestimate the amount of demand you were gonna get and Lost happens when you overestimated the amount of demand you were going to get Because you're buying the data centers ahead of time. So think about it this way Ideally you would like and again, these are stylized faxies numbers are not exact front

I am just trying to make a toy model here. Let's say half of your compute is for training and half of your compute is for inference And you know the inference has some gross margin that's like more than 50% And so what that means is that if you were in steady state you build a data center if you knew exactly exactly the demand you were getting you would You know you would you would you would you would get a certain amount of revenue say I don't know a let's say you pay a hundred billion dollars a year for compute and on 50 billion dollars a year you support

150 billion dollars on of of of of of of revenue and the other 50 billion the other 50 billion are used for training

So basically you're profitable you make fit you make 50 billion dollars a profit those are the economics of the industry today

Or sorry not today, but like that's where we're where we're projecting forwar...

Lest demand than 50 billion

Then you have more than 50% of your your data center for research and you're not profitable. So you know you train stronger models, but you're like not profitable

If you Get more demand than you thought then your research gets squeezed But you know you're you're kind of able to support more inference and you're more profitable. So it's Maybe I'm not explaining it well, but but the thing I'm trying to say is you decide the amount of compute first and then You have some target desire of inference versus

Versus training, but that gets determined by demand. It doesn't get determined by you What I'm hearing is the reason you're predicting profit is that you are systematically under investing in compute Right because if you actually like I'm saying I'm saying it's hard to predict. So so these things about 2028 and what it will happen that's our that's our attempt to do the best we can with investors All of this stuff is really uncertain because of the cone of uncertainty like we could be profitable in

2026 if the if the revenue grows fast enough and then and then You know if we if we overestimate or underestimate the next year that could swing wildly like I What I'm trying to get is you have a modeling your head of like the the business invests invests invests Get scale and and and and kind of then becomes profitable. There's a single point at which things turn around I don't think the economics of this industry work that way. I see so if I'm understanding correctly you're saying

Because of the discrepancy between the amount of compute we should have gotten and the amount of Compute we got we we were like sort of forced to make profit but that that doesn't mean we're going to continue making profit We're going to like reinvest the money because well now he has made so much progress and we want the bigger country of geniuses and so then back into Driving his high but losses are also high if we if we if we predict if every year

We predict exactly what the demand is going to be will be profitable every year Because grow because spending spending 50% of your compute on on 50% of your compute on research Roughly plus a gross margin that's higher than 50% and correct demand prediction leads to profit

That's the profit that's that's the profitable business model that I think is kind of like

There but like obscured by these like building ahead in prediction errors. I guess you're treating the 50% as a As a sort of like you know just like a given constant where as you in fact if you if the I progress is fast and you can increase the progress

My scaling up more you just have or the good percent and not make progress. Here's what I'll say you might want to scale up it more

You might want to scale it up more but but but but you know remember the log returns to scale right if If 70% would get you a very little bit of a smaller model through a factor of of 1.4x Right like that extra $20 billion is is is is you know that each each dollar there is worth much less to you because it because because the log linear set up And so you might find that it's better to invest that that that that it's better to invest that $20 billion in you know In serving inference or in hiring engineers who are who are kind of better who are kind of better who are kind of better

What they're doing so the the reign I said 50% that's not that's not exactly our target. It's not exactly going to be 50% It'll probably vary very very over time or what I'm saying is the the like log linear return What it leads to is you spend of order one Fraction of the business right like not 5% not 95% and then it then it that you know then then that you get diminishing returns because of the because of the war

Everyone's like convincing Dario but like believing AI for aggressors. I've met like Okay, you don't invest in research because it has diminishing returns, but you invest in the other things you mentioned again Again, we're talking about diminishing returns After you're spending 50 billion a year right like This is a point I'm sure you'd make but like diminishing returns on a genius is it could be quite high and more generally

Like what is profit in a market economy profit is basically saying the other companies in the market can like do more things with this money That I can then put aside and drop. I'm just trying to like because I you know I don't want to give information about anthropic is why I'm giving these stylized numbers, but like let's just derive the equilibrium of the industry

Right I think the eat so so so why doesn't everyone spend

100% of their You know 100% of their compute on training and not serve any customers right? It's because if they didn't get any revenue they couldn't raise money They couldn't do compute deals they couldn't buy more compute the next year So there's gonna be an equilibrium where every every company spends

Less than 100% on on on on on training and certainly less than 100% on inference it should be clear why

You don't just serve the current models and and you know and and and and never train another model because then

You don't have any demand because you'll because you'll fall behind so there'...

It's it's not gonna be 10% it's not gonna be 90%

Let's just say as a stylized fact it's 50% that's what I'm getting that and and and I think we're gonna be in a position where

That equilibrium of how much you spend on training Is less than the gross margins that that you're that that you're able to get uncomputed and so the the

Underline economics are profitable the problem is you have this this hellish demand prediction problem when you're when you're buying

The next year of compute and you might guess under and Be very profitable but have no compute for research or you might guess over and you know you're you're You are not profitable and you have all the compute it could compute for research and work Does that make sense just as a dynamic model of industry maybe stepping back. I'm like I'm not saying I think the country of geniuses is going to come in two years and therefore you should buy this compute

To me what you're saying the end conclusion you're arriving it makes a lot of sense but That's because like oh it seems like country geniuses is hard and there's a long way to go and so The stepping back the thing I'm trying to get it is more like It seems like your world is compatible with somebody who says we're like 10 years away from a world in which like we're generating Trillion dollars. That's just that's just not my view. Yeah, that is that is not my view like

I so so all like I'll like make another prediction it is hard for me to see That that there won't be trillions of dollars in revenue before 2030 Like I can construct a plausible world it takes maybe three

years so now that would you know that would be the end of what I think it's plausible like in 2028

We get the the real country of geniuses in the data center. You know the revenues been been go you know the revenues been going into the Maybe as it is in the low hundreds of billions by by by by 2028 and and then the country of geniuses accelerates it to trillions

You know and and basically on the slow end of diffusion it takes two years to get to the trillions

That that would that that that that would be the world where it takes until that would be the world where it takes until 2030 I I suspect even composing the technical exponential and diffusion exponential we'll get there before 2030 So you let out a model where anthropic makes profit because It seems like fundamentally we're in a compute constrained world and so it's like eventually we keep growing Compute. No, I think I think the way the profit comes is again and and you know

Let's let's just abstract the whole industry here like we have a you know, let's just imagine we're we're in like an economics textbook We have a small number of firms each can invest a limited amount and you know or like each can invest some fraction and R&D They have some marginal cost to serve the margins on that the profit margin the gross profit margins on that marginal cost are like very high Because because because inference is efficient there's some competition but the models are also differentiated

there's some there's some You know companies will compete to push their research budgets up but like because there's a small number of players

You know, we have the what is it called an economic or no equilibrium? I think is what the what the

Small number of firm equal equilibrium is it the point is it doesn't equilibrate to perfect competition with with with with with with with with Zero margins if there's like three firms if there's three firms in the economy All our kind of independently behaving behaving rationally it doesn't equilibrate to zero Help me understand that because right now we do have three leading firms and they're not making profit And so what yeah, what what is changing? Yeah, so the again the gross margins right now are very

Positive what's happened what what what's happening is a combination of two things one is we're still in the exponential scale up phase of compute. Yeah, so what basically what that means is we're training like a model gets trained

Yeah, it costs you know, let's say a model got trained that costs a billion dollars last year

And then this year it produced 4 billion dollars of revenue and cost 1 billion dollars to to to to to to to inference from um, so you know, again I'm using stylized number here But you know the 75% you know gross gross gross margins and you know this this 25% tax So that model as a whole

Makes two billion dollars Um, but at the same time we're spending ten billion dollars to train the next model because there's an exponential scale up And so the company loses money each model makes money, but the company loses money the equilibrium I'm talking about is an equilibrium where we have the country of geniuses we have the country of geniuses in the data center But that that

Model training scale up has a quilibrated more

Maybe it's still it's still going up.

leveled out a couple things there so Let's start with a current world In the current world you're right that As you said before, I'd be treated each individual model as a company it's profitable

Of course a big part of the production function of being a frontier lab is training the next model, right?

So if you didn't do that then you'd make profit for two months And you wouldn't have margins because you wouldn't have the best model and then so yeah You can make profits too much in terms of some point that reaches the biggest scale that it can reach and then and then an equilibrium We have algorithmic improvements, but we're spending roughly the same amount to train the next model as as we as we We spend to train the current model

So this equilibrium relies, I mean at some point, it's at some point you run out of money in the economy The fixed length of labor follows a very economy is going to grow, right? That's one of your predictions. Well, we're going to yes, but this is it is this phase But this is another example of the theme I was talking about which is that the economy will grow much faster with AI then I think it ever has before but it's not like right now the computer's growing 3x a year. Yeah, I don't believe the economy is going to grow 300% a year like I said this in machines of loving grace

Like I think we may get 10 or 20% per year growth in the economy, but we're not going to get 300% growth in the economy

So I think I think in the end, you know, if compute becomes the majority of what the economy produces

It's going to be kept by that. So let's let's assume a model where compute stays capped. Yeah The world where frontier labs are making money is one where they continue to make Fast progress because fundamentally your margin is limited by How good the alternative is and so you are able to make money because you have a frontier model If you did not hurt your model you wouldn't be making money. Um, you I mean and so that this model requires

There never to be a steady state like forever and ever you actually making no I don't think that's true

I mean I feel like we're like we're like we're taught we're you know, we're the feel like this is an economic So like you know, this is like an economics, we never stop talking about economics. We never we never stop talking about economics So no, but but there there are there are worlds in which You know, they're so I don't think this field's going to be a monopoly all my lawyers never want me to say But I don't think this field's going to be a monopoly, but but you do get you get industries in which there are small

Number of players not one, but a small number of players and Or narrowly like the the way you get monopolies like Facebook or or Met or I always call it Facebook, but um Is these kind of net and is these kind of these kind of network effects? Yeah, the way you get industries in which there are small number of players are Very high-class of entry, right?

So you know a cloud is like this. I think cloud is a good example of this You have three maybe four players within cloud. I think. I think that's the same gray eye three maybe four And the reason is that it's it's so expensive it requires so much Expertise and so much capital to like Run a cloud company right and so you have to put up all this capital and then in addition to putting up all this

Capugal you have to get all of this other stuff that like you know Requires a lot of skill to you know to make it happen and so it's like if you go to someone and you're like

I would disrupt this industry here's a hundred billion dollars or like okay

I'm putting a hundred billion dollars and also betting that you can do all these other things that these people have been doing One of you creates a profit in the history and then and then the effect of your entry and this is the profit margins Go down so you know we have Equilibria like this all the time in the economy where we have a few we have a few players Profits are not Astronomical margins are not astronomical, but they're they're not zero, right?

And you know, I think I think that's what we see on cloud cloud is very undifferentiated models are more differentiated than cloud

Right like everyone knows Claude is Claude is good at different things then GPT is good at is then then Gemini is good at and it's not just Claude's good at coding GPT is good at you know math and reasoning, you know It's more subtle than that like models are good at different types of coding models have different styles like I think I think these things are actually You know quite different from each other, and so I would expect more differentiation than you see in in

Cloud now there there actually is a Counter there there there is one counter argument and that counter argument is that if all of that the process of producing models becomes If AI models can do that themselves then that could spread throughout the economy But that is not an argument for commoditizing AI models in general that's kind of an argument for commoditizing the whole economy at once

I don't know what what quite happens in that world were basically anyone can do anything anyone can build anything and there's like

No mode around anything at all.

Maybe you know when what maybe when when when when kind of AI models can do you know when when when when when I am

I was can do everything if we've solved all the safety and security problems like you know that's one of the one of the mechanisms for For you know You know just just kind of the economy flattened itself again, but but that's kind of like post like far post countries. This isn't a data center. Maybe a finer way to put that potential point is one It seems like AI research is

Especially loaded on raw intellectual power which will be especially a button in the world with the DGI and two if you just look at the world today There's very few technologies that seem to be diffusing as fast as As AI algorithmic progress and so the does hint that this industry sort of structurally

Defusive so I think coding is going fast, but I think AI research is a super set of coding and their aspects of it that are not going fast

But I but I do think again once we get coding once we get AI models going fast then you know

You know, you know, that will speed up the ability of AI models to kind of to kind of do everything else So I think while coding is going fast now I think once the AI models are building the next AI models and building everything else the kind of whole the whole economy will side it kind of go at the same pace. I am I am Worried geographically though. I'm a little worried that like just proximity to AI having heard about AI

That that may be one differentiator and so when I said the like you know 10 or 20% growth rate a worry I have is that the growth rate could be like 50% in Silicon Valley and You know parts of the world that are kind of socially connected to Silicon Valley and you know Not that much faster than its current pace elsewhere and I think that'd be a pretty messed up world

So one of the things I think about a lot is how to prevent that. Yeah. Do you think that once we have

This computer geniuses a data center that robotics is sort of quickly solved afterwards because it seems like a big problem of the robotics is that A human can learn how to teleport rate current hardware, but current AI models can at least not not in a way that's super productive And so if we have this ability to learn like a human should it solve robotics immediately? I don't think it's dependent on learning like a human It could happen in different ways again We could have trained the model on many different video games, which are like robotic controls or many different

simulated robotics environments or just you know train them to control computer screens and they learn to generalize so it will happen It's not necessarily dependent on Human-like learning human-like learning is one way it could happen if the models like oh I pick up a robot. I don't know how to use it. I learned that that could happen because we discovered a Discovering continual learning that could also happen because we train the model on a bunch of environments and then generalized or

It could happen because the model learns that in the context like it doesn't actually matter which way if we go back to the discussion We had like like an hour ago that type of thing can happen in that type of thing can happen in several different ways Yeah, but but I do think when for forever reason the models have those skills then Robotics will be revolutionized both the design of robots because the models will be much better than humans at that And also the the ability to kind of control robots

So we'll get better at the physical building the physical hardware building the physical robots and we'll also get better at controlling it now You know does that mean the robotics Industry will so be generating trillions of dollars of revenue my answer there is yes, but there will be the same Extremely fast, but not infinitely fast diffusion, so will robotics be be revolutionized. Yeah, maybe tack on another year or two

That's that's might that's the way I think about these things

There's a general skepticism about extremely fast progress They here here's my baby, which is like it sounds like you are gonna solve continue learning what we're in other within the matter of years, but just as people weren't talking about Continual learning a couple of years ago, and then we realized oh why are these models as useful as they could be right now Even though they are clearly passing the touring test and are experts in somebody who do it for domains

Maybe it's this thing and then we solve this thing and we realize actually there's another Another thing that human intelligence can do and that's a basis of human labor that these models can't do and then So why not think there will be more things like this why I think that like Where you know we've like found the pieces of human intelligence well well to be clear I mean, I think continual learning as I said before might not be a barrier at all. Yeah, right like like you know

I think I think we may be just get there by pre-training generalization and and and and and and and our L generalization like I think there but just might not be

There basically might not be such a thing at all in fact

I would point to the history in in ML of

People coming up with things that are barriers that end up kind of dissolving...

People talked about you know You know how do you have You know how do how do you how do your models keep track of nouns and verbs and you know how do they you know They can understand some ant syntactically, but they can't understand Semantically you know it's only statistical correlations you can understand a paragraph

You can understand a word there's reasoning you can't do reasoning, but then suddenly it turns out

You can do code and math very well at all. So I think there actually there's there's actually a stronger history of

Some of these things seeming like a big deal and then and then kind of and then kind of dissolving some of them are real I mean the need for data's real may be continual Continual alert continual learning is a real thing, but again I would ground us in something like code like I think we may get to the point in like a year or two where the models can just do sweet and dead like That's a whole task. That's a whole sphere of human activity that we're just saying models can do it now

When you say end to end do mean Setting technical direction and understanding the context of the problem. Yes, yes, so I mean all of that interesting. I mean That that is if you're like AJ I complete Millionaires, maybe is internally consistent, but it's not like saying 90% of code or 100% of code It's like no, no, no, no, no, no, I gave this I gave this spectrum 90% of code 100% of code

90% of end-tents, we 100% of end-tents, we new tasks are created for sweys eventually those get done as well But the long Spanish on there, but we're traversing the spectrum very quickly. Yeah, I do think it's funny that I've seen a couple of podcasts you've done where

The host will be like but work has for the session about the control learning thing and it always makes you crack off because you're like

You know, you've been in the AI researcher for like 10 years

I'm sure there's like some feeling of like okay, so podcasts are what did that say?

You know like every internet I get asked about it. You know, the truth and the truth of the matter is that we're all trying to figure this out together Yeah, right there there are some ways in which I Amable to see things that others aren't these days that probably has more to do with like I can see a bunch of stuff within and throw up and I have to make a bunch of decisions Then I have any great research insight that that others don't, right?

I you know, I'm running in 2500 person company like it's it's actually pretty hard for me to have Concrete research insight, you know, much harder than you know, then then it would have been you know 10 years ago or or you know We're even two or three years ago As we go towards a world of a full drop in remote work of replacement does a

API pricing model still make the most sense and if not what is the correct way to price a GI or serve a GI?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's going to be a bunch of different business models here sort of all at once that are going to be That are going to be experimented with I I actually do think that the the API Model is is more durable than many people think one way I think about it is if the Technology is kind of advancing quickly if it's advancing exponentially

What that means is there's there's there's always kind of like a surface area of kind of new use cases that have been developed in in the last

In the last three months and any kind of product surface you put in place is always at risk of Sort of becoming irrelevant right any given product surface probably makes sense for our you know a range of capabilities of the model right the The chatbot is already running into limitations of you know Making it smarter doesn't really help the average consumer that much, but I don't think that's a limitation of AI models I don't think that's evidence that you know the models are are the models are good enough and they're there, you know

Them getting better doesn't matter to the economy. It doesn't matter to that particular product and And so I think the value of the API is the API always offers an opportunity You know very close to the bare metal to build on what the latest thing is and so they're you know There's there's there's kind of always going to be this you know this this kind of Front of new start-ups and new ideas that weren't possible a few months ago and are possible because the model is advancing and and so I

Actually I kind of actually predict that we are it's going to exist alongside other models But we're always going to have the API business model because there's always going to be a need for a Thousand different people to try experimenting with the model in different way and a hundred of them become startups and ten of them become big Successful startups and you know two or three really end up being the the way that people use the model of a

Of a given generation so I basically think it's always going to exist at the same time

I'm sure there's going to be other models as well like not every token

That's output by the model was worth the same amount think about

You know how how what is the value of the tokens that are like you know that the model outputs when someone you know Call you know someone you know calls them up and says my mac isn't working or something You know the models like restart it, right? Yeah, and like you know someone hasn't heard that before but like you know the model said that like

10 million times right you know that that maybe that's worth like a dollar or a few cents or something

Whereas if the model you know the model goes to you know one of the one of the pharmaceutical companies and it says

Oh, you know this molecule you're developing you should take the aromatic ring from that end of the molecule and put it on that

End of molecule and and and you know if you do that wonderful things will happen Like like those tokens could be worth you know that's a millions of dollars, right? So so I think we're definitely going to see business models that that recognize that you know at some point We're going to see you know pay for results or you know in some in some form or we may see Forms of compensation that are like labor

You know that that kind of work by the hour I you know I don't know I think I think I think because it's a new industry a lot of things are going to be tried and I you know

I don't know what will turn out to be the right thing

What I find I take your point that people will have to try things to figure out what is the best way to use this blob of intelligence, but what I find striking is Claude code so I don't think in the history of startups there has been Single application that has been as hotly competed in has coding agents and

And and the Claude code is a category leader here and that seems surprising to me like it doesn't seem intrinsically like anthropic hat to build this And I wonder if you have an accounting of why it had to be anthropic or why how anthropic ended up building an application and in addition to the Model underlying it. Yeah, so it actually happened in a pretty simple way which is we had our own You know

We had our coding models which were good at coding and you know around the beginning of 2025

I said I I think the time is come where you can have non-trivial acceleration of your own research If you're an AI company by using these models and of course, you know We you need an interface and you need a harness to use them and so I encourage people internally

And I didn't say this is one thing that you know that you have to use I just said people should experiment with this and

Then you know this thing I think it might have been originally called Claude CLI and then the name eventually got changed to Claude code internally Was the thing that kind of everyone was using and it was seen fast internal adoption and I looked at it And I said probably we should launch this externally, right?

You know, it's it's seen such fast adoption within anthropic like You know Like you know coding is a lot of what we do and so you know we have a we have a audience of many many Hundreds of people that's in some ways at least representative of the external audience So it looks like we already have product market fit. Let's launch this thing

And then we've launched it and and and I think you know just just the fact that We are selves are kind of developing the model and we are selves know what we most need to use the model

I think it's it's kind of creating this feedback loop. I see in the sense that you

Let's say a developer at anthropic it's like, ah, it would be better if it was better at this x thing and Then you bake that into the next model that you build that that's that's one version of it But but then there's just the ordinary product iteration of like you know we have a bunch of we have a bunch of coders within anthropic like We you know, they like use quad code every day and so we get fast feedback That was more important in the early days now, of course

There are millions of people using it and so we get a bunch of external feedback as well But it's you know, it's just great to be able to get you know kind of kind of Fast fast internal feedback You know, I think this is the reason why we launched a coding model and you know didn't launch a pharmaceutical company right at you know You know my backgrounds in in my backgrounds in in like biology, but like we don't have any of the resources that are needed to launch a pharmaceutical company

So there's been a ton of hyper on open claw and I wanted to check it out for myself I'm gonna date coming up with this weekend and I don't have anything planned yet So I gave open claw a Mercury debit card. I said a couple hundred dollar limit and I said surprise me Okay, so here's the knock-meaning it's on and besides having access to my Mercury It's totally quarantined. Now as you felt quite comfortable giving you an access to a debit card because Mercury makes it super easy to set of guard rails

I was able to customize permissions cap the spend and restricted category of purchases I wanted to make sure the debit card worked so I asked open claw to just make a test transaction and decided to do it in a couple bucks to Wikipedia Besides that I have no idea what's gonna happen. I will report back on the next episode about how it goes In the meantime if you want a personal baking solution that can accommodate all the different ways that people

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You know she thinks we're getting coffee and walking around the neighborhood Let me ask you about now making AI go well It seems like whatever vision we have about How AI goes well has to be compatible with two things one is The ability to build and run a eyes is diffusing

Extremely rapidly and two is that the population of a eyes the amount we have in their intelligence will also increase very rapidly and That means that lots of people will be able to build huge populations of misaligned a eyes or A eyes which are just like companies which are trying to increase their

Footprint or have weird sikis like Sidney Bing, but now they're super human. What is a vision for a world in which

We have an equilibrium that is compatible with lots of different AI. Some of which are misaligned running around. Yeah. Yeah, so I think you know in the adolescence of technology

I was kind of you know skeptical of like the balance of power But I think I was particularly skeptical of or the thing I was specifically skeptical of is you have like three or four of these companies like Kind of all building models that are kind of dry, you know, sort of sort of um Like drive from the like drive from the same thing and You know that that these would check each other or even that kind of you know any number of them would would would would would

Check each other like we might live in a offense dominant world where you know like one person or one AI model is like smart enough to do something that like causes damage for everything else I think in the I mean in the short run we have a limited number of players now. So we can start by within the limited number of players. We

You know, we kind of you know, we we need to put in place the you know the safeguards

We need to make sure everyone does the right alignment work. We need to make sure everyone has bio classifiers like you know Those are those are kind of the immediate things we need to do. I agree that you know that that doesn't solve the problem in the long run particularly if the ability of AI models to make other AI models proliferates then you know

The whole thing can kind of um, you know can become harder solve. You know, I think in the long run

We need some architecture of governance right some are some architecture of governance that preserves human freedom But but kind of also allows us to like you know govern the very large number of kind of You know Human systems AI systems You know hybrid hybrid hybrid human human you know

Hybrid hybrid human AI like you know companies or like or like or like economic units. So, you know We're gonna need to think about like, you know, how do we how do we protect the world against You know bioterrorism how do we protect the world against like you know against like against like mirror life like You know, we're probably we're gonna need to you know Need some kind of like AI monitoring system that like modern you know kind of monitors for for all of these things

But then we need to build this in a way that like you know

Preserve civil liberties and like our constitutional rights. So I think just just as is as is anything else like

It's it's like a new security landscape with a new set of You know a new set of tools and a new set of vulnerabilities and I think my worry is If we had a hundred years for this to happen all very slowly we'd get used to it, you know like we've gotten used to like You know the presence of you know the presence of explosives in society or like the you know the presence of various

You know like new weapons or the you know the pre the presence of video cameras We would get used to it over over over over 100 and we develop Governance mechanisms. We'd make our mistakes my my worry is just that this happening. I'll also fast and so I think maybe We need to do our thinking faster about how to make these governance mechanisms work. Yeah It seems like in an offense dominant world

Over the course of the next century. So the idea is the AI is making the progress that would happen over the next century happen in Some period of five to ten years But we would still need to see mechanisms or balance of power would be similarly intractable Even if humans were the only game in town and And so I guess we have the advice of AI

It fundamentally doesn't seem like a totally different ball game here if ejection balances were gonna work They would work with humans as well if they aren't gonna work. They wouldn't work with the eyes as well And so maybe this is just doom as human checks and balances as well, but yeah, again I think there's some way to I think there's some way to make this happen like it You know it just it just you know the government so the world may have to work together to make it happen like you know

We may have to you may have to talk to AI's about kind of you know building s...

I don't know. I mean this is so this is you know

I don't want to say so far ahead in time, but like so far ahead in tech technological ability that may happen over a short period of time That it's hard for us to anticipate in advance I'm speaking of governments getting involved on December 26 the tendency legislator introduced a bill which said quote It would be a fence for a person to knowingly train our official intelligence to provide emotional support Including through open ended conversations with the user and of course one of the things that

Claude attempts to do is be a thoughtful A thoughtful friend thoughtful knowledgeable friend and

In general, it seems like we're gonna have this patchwork of state laws a lot of the benefits that normal people could experience

Bezer result of AI are going to be curtail especially when we get into the kinds of things you discuss in machines Love and grace biological freedom mental health improvements, et cetera, et cetera It seems easy to imagine worlds in which these get whack them all the way by different laws whereas Bills like this don't seem to address the

Actual existential threats that you're concerned about. So I'm curious about To understand in the context of things like this your anthropics position against the Federal moratorium on state AI laws. Yes, so I don't know. There's there's many different things going on at once right

I think I think that that I think that particular law is is dumb like you know

I think it was it was clearly made by legislators who just probably had little idea what AI models could do And not do they're like hey, I model serving as that just sounds scary like I don't want I don't want that to happen So you know we're not we're not in favor of that right, but but but but that you know that that wasn't the thing that was being voted on thing that was being voted on is We're going to ban all state regulation of AI for 10 years

with no apparent plan to do any federal regulation of AI which would take Congress to pass which is a very high bar So you know the idea that we'd ban states from do anything for 10 years And people said they had a plan for federal government, but you know there was no actual there was no proposal on the table there was no actual attempt Given the serious dangers that I lay out in

Adolescence of technology around things like the you know kind of biological weapons and bioterrorism autonomy risk And the timelines we've been talking about like 10 years is an eternity like that's that's a that's a

I think that's a crazy thing to do so if if that's the choice if that's what you force us to choose

Then then we're going to we're going to choose not to have that moratorium and you know I think the the benefits of that position exceed the costs but it's it's not a perfect position if that's the choice now I think the thing that we should do the thing that I would support is the federal government should

Step in not saying states you can't regulate but here's what we're going to do and and states

You can't differ from this right like I think preemption is fine in the sense of saying that federal government says Here's our standards this applies to everyone states can't do something different that would be something I would support if it will be done in the right way What but but this idea of states you can't do anything and we're not doing anything either that that struck that struck us as You know very much not making sense and I think we'll not age well was already starting to not age well with with all the

backlash that that you see now in terms of in terms of what we would want I mean you know the things we've talked about are Are starting with transparency standards You know in order to monitor some of these autonomy risks and bioterrorism risks as the risks become more serious

As we as we get more evidence for them then I think we could be more aggressive in some targeted ways and and say hey

I bioterrorism is really a threat let's let's pass a law that kind of forces people to have classifiers And I could even imagine it depends it depends how serious the threat it ends up being we don't know for sure And we need to pursue this in an intellectually honest way where we say ahead of time the risk has not emerged yet But I could certainly imagine with the pace that things are going that you know I could imagine a world where later this year we say hey this this AI

Bioterrorism stuff is really serious. We should do something about it. We should put it in a federal we should you know put it in a federal standard and if the federal government won't After we should put it in the state state standard. I could totally see that I'm concerned about a world where If you just consider the the pace the progress you're expecting the life cycle of of legislation You know that the benefits are as you say because a diffusion lag the benefits are slow enough that I really do think this patchwork of

On the current trajectory this patchwork of state laws would prohibit I mean having an emotional chatbot friend is something that freaks people out then just imagine the kinds of actual benefits from AI we want

Normal people to be able to experience from improvements in health and health...

Whereas at the same time It seems like you think the dangers are already on the horizon and I just don't see that much It seems like would be especially injurious to the benefits of AI as compared to the dangers of AI So that that's maybe the where the cost benefit makes less sense to me. So so there's a few things here, right? I mean people talk about there being thousands of these state laws

First of all the vast mass majority of them do not pass

And you know the you know the world works a certain way in theory, but like just because the laws been passed doesn't mean it's really enforced right? The people the people you know implementing it may be like oh my god, this is stupid. It would mean shutting off like you know Everything that's ever been built in everything that's ever been built in Tennessee So you know very often laws are interpreted in like you know a way that makes them that that that makes them not as dangerous or not as harmful on on the same side of course

You have to worry if you're passing the law to stop a bad thing you had this you had this problem as well. Yeah

Look my my look I mean my basic view is you know if if if you know we could decide you know what laws were passed and how things were done Which you know we're only one small input input into that you know I would

deregulate a lot of the stuff around the health benefits of AI

I think you know I don't worry as much about the like the the the kind of chatbot Laws I actually worry more about the drug approval process where I think AI models are going to Gray league celebrate The rate at which we discover drugs and just the the pipeline will get jammed up like the pipeline will not be prepared to like process All of the stuff that's going through it so you know

I think I think reform of the regulatory process to buy us more towards we have a lot of things coming where the safety in the efficacy is actually going to be Really crisp and clear like I mean a beautiful thing really really really crisp and clear and like really really effective But you know and and maybe we don't need all this all this some

Like um all this superstructure around it that was designed around an era of drugs that barely work and often have serious side effects But at the same time I think we should be ramping up quite significantly the You know this this kind of safety and security legislation and you know like I've said You know starting with transparency is is my view of Trying not to hamper the industry right trying to find the right balance

I'm worried about it some people criticize my essay for saying that's too slow the dangers of AI will come too soon if we do that

Well basically I kind of think like

The last six months and maybe the next few months are going to be about transparency and then If these if these risks emerge when we're more certain of them which I think we might be as soon as let as later this year

Then I think we need to act very fast in the areas that we've actually seen the risk like I think the only way to do this is to be nimble now

The legislative process is normally not nimble but we we need to Emphasize To everyone involved the urgency of this that's why I'm sending this message of urgency right that's why I wrote The lessons of technology. I wanted policy makers to read it. I wanted economists to read it. I want National security professionals to read it, you know, I want decision makers to read it

So that they have some hope of acting faster than they would have otherwise Is there anything you can do or advocate that would Make it's more certain that the benefits of AI are Better and saturated where I feel like you have worked with legislators to be like okay, we're going to prevent bioterism here away We're going to increase the insurgency. We're going to increase risk of blood protection and I just think by default the actual bent like the things we're looking forward to here

It just seems very easy this seem very fragile to Different kinds of moral panic or political economy problems. Yeah, I don't actually so so I don't actually agree that much in the developed world I feel like you know in the developed world like markets function pretty well and When there's when there's like a lot of Money to be made on something and it's clearly the best available alternative to actually hard for the regulatory system to stop it

You know, we're we're seeing that in AI itself right? I you know like a thing I've been trying to fight for as the Export controls on chips to China right and like that's in the national security interests of the US Like you know that's like square within the you know the policy beliefs of you know Almost everyone in Congress of both parties, but

And you know, I think the case is very clear the counter arguments against it are

I'll politely call them fishy And yet It doesn't happen and we sell the chips because there's there's so much money. There's so much money riding on it

You know the that money wants to be made and in that case in my opinion that'...

But but it also it also applies when it's a good thing and and so

I don't think that if we're talking about drugs and benefits of the technology I I I am not as worried about those benefits being hampered in the developed world I am a little worried about them going too slow and I as I said I do think we should work To speed the approval process in the FDA. I do think we should fight against these chatbot bills that you're describing right described individually

I'm against them. I think they're stupid

But I actually think the bigger worry is a developing world Where we don't have functioning markets where you know we often can't build on the technology that that we've had I worry more that those folks will get left behind and I worry that even if the cures are developed

You know, maybe there's someone in rural Mississippi who who doesn't get it as well right that's a that's a kind of smaller version of the thing

The concern we have in the in the developing world and so the things we've been doing are you know You know we work with you know we work with you know philanthropists right you know we work with folks Who you know who you know deliver you know medicine and health interventions to you know to developing world to sub to here in Africa You know India Latin America you know You know other other developing parts of the world. That's the thing. I think that won't happen on its own

You mentioned extra controls. Yeah, why can't the US and China both have a country of geniuses? Why did it center? Why can't do no?

Why won't it happen or why shouldn't it happen? Why shouldn't it happen? Um you know I think I think if this does happen

You know then then we kind of have a Well we could have a few situations if we have like an offense dominant situation We could have a situation like nuclear weapons, but like more dangerous right where it's like gun you know kind of kind of either side Could it easily destroy everything um we could also have a world where it's kind of It's unstable like the nuclear equilibrium is stable right because it's you know, it's like deterrence

But let's say there were uncertainty about like if the two AI's fought which AI would win That could create instability right you often have conflict when the two sides have a different assessment of They're likelihood of winning right if one side is like oh yeah, there's a 90% chance all win and the other sides like There's a 90% chance all win then then then a fight is much more likely They can't both be right, but they can't both think that but this is a good fully general argument against the diffusion of AI technology

Which it may it would have that's implication of this world. Let me let let let let me just go

I because I think we will get diffusion eventually the other concern I have is that people the government will oppress their own people with AI and and and so

You know I'm I'm just I'm worried about some world where you have a country that's already You know, you know, kind of a You know You know, there's there's a government that kind of kind of already You know is kind of kind of building a you know attack a high-tech authoritarian state

And to be clear this is about the government this is not about the people like people We need to find a way for people everywhere to benefit my worry here is about governments So yeah my you know my my worry is if the world gets carved up into two pieces one of those two pieces could be A authoritarian or totalitarian in a way that's very difficult to displace

now will will governments eventually get powerful AI and and you know there's risk of authoritarianism. Yes

We'll government eventually get powerfully AI and there's risk of You know of kind of bad bad bad equilibrium Yes, I think both things but the initial conditions matter right you know At some point we're need we're gonna need to set up the rules of the road I'm not saying that one country either the United States or a coalition of democracies

Which I think would be a better set up or requires more international cooperation that we currently seem to want to make But you know, I don't I don't think a coalition of democracies or or certainly one country should just say these are the rules of the road There's gonna be some negotiation right the world is gonna have to grapple with this and what I would like is that the the the you know the democratic Nations of the world those with you know who who's governments have

Represent closer to pro human values are are holding the stronger hand then have have more leverage when the rules of the road are set And so I'm I'm very concerned about that initial condition I was really thinking to interview from three years ago and One of the ways it aged poorly is that I kept asking questions assuming there's gonna be some key Fulcrum moment it two to three years from now when in fact being that far out it just seems like progress continues

AI improves AI is more diffused people use it for more things it seems like you're imagining a world in the future where

The countries get together and here's the rule of the road and here's the lev...

When it seems like on courage directory everybody will have more AI Some of that AI will be used by authoritarian countries some of that within the authoritarian countries will be by it's by private actors versus state actors

It's not clear who will benefit more. It's always unpredictable to tell an advanced you know

It seems like the internet privileged authoritarian countries more than you would have expected And maybe the AI will be the opposite way around So I I want to better understand what you're imagining here. Yeah. Yeah. So so just to be precise about it

I think the exponential of the underlying technology will continue as it has before right the models get

smarter and smarter even when they get to country of geniuses in the data center You know, I think you can continue to make the model smarter. There's a question of like Getting diminishing returns on their Value in the world right how much does it matter after you've already solved human biology or you know You know at some point you can do harder math you can do more abstract math problems, but nothing after that matters

But putting that aside I do think the the exponential will continue but there will be Certain distinguished points on the exponential and companies Individuals countries will reach those points at different times and and so you know There's there you know could there be so you know, you know, I talk about is a nuclear deterrent still in Alessance of technology is a nuclear deterrent still stable in the world of of a I don't know

But that's that's an example of like one thing we've taken for granted that like the technology could reach such a level that it's no longer like You know, we can no longer be certain of at least You know think of think of others, you know there there there you know there there are kind of points where if you if you reach a certain point You may be you have offensive cyber dominance and like every every computer system is transparent to you after that

I you must the other side has it has a kind of equivalent defense

So I don't know what the critical moment is or if there's a single critical moment

But I think there will be either a critical moment a small number of critical moment or some critical window where it's like AI is AI can fur some large Advantage from the perspective of national security and One country or coalition has reached it before others that that you know that that you know I'm not advocating that they're just like okay, we're in charge now that that's not that's not how I think about it

You know that there's always the the other side is catching up. There's extreme actions You're not willing to take and and it's not right to take you know to take complete To take complete control anyway, but but at the point that that happens I think people are going to understand that the world has changed and there there's going to be some Negotiation implicit or implicit about

What what is the what is the post AI world order look like and and I think my interest is in

You know making that negotiation B1 in which You know Classical liberal democracy has you know has a strong hand. Well, I want to understand what that better means because you say in the essay quote

A talkercy is simply not a form of government that people can accept in the post-powerful AI age

And that sounds that you're saying the CCP as an institution cannot exist after we get AI And that seems like Like a very strong demand and it seems to imply a world where the leading Lab or the leading country Will be able to and by the language should

Get to determine how the world is governed or what kinds of Governments are allowed and not allowed. Yeah, so when when I Believe that paragraph was I think I said something like you could take it even further and say X So I wasn't I wasn't necessarily endorsing that that I wasn't necessarily endorsing that view I you know, I was saying like here's if first you know here's a weaker thing that I believe you know

I think you know, I think I said you know we have to worry a lot about Authoritarians and you know, we should try and you know kind of kind of check them and limit their power Like you could take this kind of further much more interventionist view that says like authoritarian countries with AI are these you know You know these kind of self-fulfilling cycles that you can't that are very hard to displace and so you just need to get rid of them

Front from the beginning that that has exactly all the problems you say which is you know You know if you were to make a commitment to overthrowing every authority in country I mean they then they would take a bunch of actions now that like you know that that could could lead to instability So that that Man, you know that that that just that just may not be possible

But the point I was making that I do endorse is that it is It is quite possible that you know today

You know

The view or at least my view or the view and most the Western world is is democracy is a better form of government than authoritarianism

But it's not like if a country's authoritarian We don't react the way we react it if they committed a genocide or something right and and I'm What I guess what I'm saying is I'm a little worried that in the age of a GI Authoritarianism will have a different meaning it will be a grave or thing And and we have to decide when we are another how how how how how how how to deal with that and the interventionist view is one possible view

I was exploring such views You know May end up being the right view. It may end up being too extreme to be the right view But I do have hope and and one piece of hope I have is There is we have seen that as new technologies are invented

Forms of government become obsolete. I I mentioned this in

Addilessence of technology where I said you know like feudalism was basically you know like a form of government right and and then when

When we invented industrialization feudalism was no longer sustainable no longer made sense Why is that hope why we couldn't that imply that democracy is no longer going to be well competitive system It could go it could go either way right but but I actually so These problems with

Authoritarianism right that the problems of the authoritarianism get deeper I just I wonder if that's an indicator of Other problems that authoritarianism will have right another words people become Because of authoritarianism becomes worse people are more afraid of authoritarianism they work harder to stop it

It's it's more of a like you have to think in terms of totally equilibrium right

I just wonder if it will motivate New ways of thinking about with with with the new technology how to preserve and protect freedom and and even more optimistically will it lead to a collective reckoning and you know Kind of a more emphatic realization of how important some of the things we take as individual rights are right a more emphatic realization that we just we really can't give these away. There's there we've seen

There's no other way to live that actually works I I I I I am actually I am actually hopeful that I guess one way to say it it sounds too Idealistic but I actually believe it could be the case is that is that dictatorships become morally obsolete They become morally unworkable forms of government and that and that and that the the the crisis That creates is is sufficient to force us to find another way

I think there is genuinely a tough question here, which I'm not sure how you resolve and we've had to Come out one word another on a through history, right? So with China and the 70s and 80s if you decided Even though it's an authoritarian system we will engage with it

I think it right respect that was the right call because it is state authoritarian system but

A billion plus people are much wealthier and better off than they would have otherwise been

And it's not clear that it would have stopped being an authoritarian country otherwise you can just look at North Korea as an example of that right and I don't know if that to stop wasn't that much intelligence to Remain in the authoritarian country that Continues to co less its own power as you can just imagine a North Korea with an AI that's much worse than everybody else is but still enough to keep power and And then so in general it seems like

Should we just have this attitude of the benefits of AI will in the form of all these Empowerments of humanity and health and so forth will be big and in historically we have decided It's good to spread the benefits of technology widely even with even to people whose governments are authoritarian and I think I guess it is a tough question We're how to think about it with the AI but Historically we have said yes this is a positive some world and it's still worth diffusing the technology

Yeah, so so there are a number of choices. We have I you know, I think framing this as

a kind of government to government decision and and you know in national security terms that's like one lens But there are a lot of other lenses like you could imagine a world where you know we produce all these cures to diseases and like You know the the cures to diseases are fine to sell to authoritarian countries the data centers just aren't right the chips and the data centers just aren't And that the AI industry itself You know like like another possibility is and and I think folks should think about this like

You know could there be Developments we can make either that naturally happen as a result of AI or that we could make happen by building technology on AI Could we create an equilibrium where where it becomes Infeasible for authoritarian countries to deny their people kind of private use of the benefits of the technology You know are there are there are there are there are there equilibrium where we can kind of

Give everyone in the authoritarian country their own AI model that kind of

You know, you know like defend themselves from surveillance and there isn't a way for the authoritarian country to like

Crack crack down on this while while retaining power. I don't know that that sounds to me like if that went far enough It would be it would be a reason why the authoritarian countries would disintegrate from the inside But but maybe there's a middle world where like there's an equilibrium where if they want to hold on to power the Authoritarians can't deny kind of individualized access access to the technology But I actually do have a hope for the for the for the more radical version, which is you know

Is it possible that the technology might inherently have properties or that by building on it in certain ways we could create properties That that that that have this kind of dissolving effect on authoritarian structures now We we hope originally right we think that I back to the beginning of the bomb administration we thought originally that That you know social media and and the internet would have that property turns out not to

But but I don't know what what if we could What if we could try again with with the knowledge of how many things could go wrong and that this is a different technology I don't know that it would work, but it's worth the try. Yeah, I think it's just it's very unpredictable like there's

First principles reasons why authoritarian is a very unpredictable. I don't think I mean we got it we just got it we kind of

We got to recognize the problem and then we got to come up with 10 things we can try and we got to try those and then assess

Whether they're working or which ones are working if any and then try new ones if the old ones are but that that's how to today is you say

We will not sell data centers or sorry at ships and then the ability to make ships to China And so in some sense you are denying There will be some benefits to that's right the Chinese economy Chinese people. It's at or out because we're doing that and then there'll also be benefits to the American economy because It's a positive some world we could trade they could have their country data centers doing one thing we could have hours doing another and Already we you're saying it's not worth that

Positive some stipend to empower this country. What what I would say is that you know we are we are about to be in a world where Growth and economic value will come very easily if right if we're able to build these powerfully I models growth and economic value will come very easily what will not come easily is Distribution of benefits Distribution of wealth

political freedom

You know, these are the things that are going to be hard to achieve and so when I think about policy

I think I think that The technology and the market will deliver all the fundamental benefits. You know almost almost faster than we can take them And and that these questions about About distribution and political freedom and rights are are are the ones that that will actually matter and that policy should focus on Okay, so speaking of distribution as you're mentioning we have developing countries and

In many cases catch up growth as we've been weaker than we would have hoped for yes when catch up growth does happen It's fundamentally because they have underutilized labor Yeah, you can bring the capital and know how from developers countries to these countries and then they can grow quite rapidly. Yes, obviously in a world where Labor is no longer the constraining factor This mechanism no longer works and it's just the hope basically to rely on

Philanthropy from the people who immediately get wealthy from AI or from the countries that get wealthy And what is the hope for I mean, I mean philanthropy should obviously play some role as it has

You know as it has as in the past, but I think growth is always

Growth is always better and stronger if we can make it endogenous. Yeah, so you know

What are the relevant industries in like in like in like in like an AI driven world look there's lots of stuff You know like there's you know I said I said we shouldn't build data centers in China, but there's no reason we shouldn't build data centers in Africa, right In fact, I think it'd be great to build data centers in Africa You know as long as they're not owned by China. We should we should build we should build data centers in Africa

I think that's a that's that's I think that's a great thing to do You know we should also build you know there's no reason we can't build You know a pharmaceutical industry that's like AI driven like you know the if AI is accelerating Accelerating drug discovery then you know there will be a bunch of biotech startups like let's make sure some of those happen in the developing world and Certainly during the transition. I mean we can talk about the point where humans have no role, but but

Humans will have still have some role in starting up these companies and supervising supervising the AI models So let's make sure some loose humans are humans in the developing world so that fast growth can happen there as well You guys recently announced quad is gonna have a constitution that's aligned to set of values and not necessarily just to the end user And there's a world that can imagine where if it is aligned to the end user It preserves the balance of power we have in the world today because everybody gets to have their own AI

That's advocating for them and so the ratio of bad actors and good actors stays constant it seems to work out for our world today Why is it better not to do that but to have a specific set of values that the AI should carry forward? Yeah, so I'm not sure I'd quite draw the distinction in that way. There there are maybe two relevant

Distinctions here which are I think you're talking about a mix of the two lik...

Should we give them model a set of instructions about do this and versus don't do this and the other you know versus should we give them Model a set of principles for you know for a kind of how to act and and there it's it's You know it's It's just it's kind of purely a practical and empirical thing that we've observed That by teaching the model principles getting it to learn from principles

It's behavior is more consistent it's easier to cover edge cases and the model is more likely to do what people want it to do In other words if you you know if you're like you know don't tell people how to hotwire a car Don't speak in Korean don't you know that you know just you know if you give it a list of rules It doesn't really understand the rules and it's kind of hard to generalize from them You know if it's just kind of a like you know

List of do do's and don'ts words if you give it principles and then you know it has some hard guardrails like don't make biological weapons But overall you're trying to understand What it should be aiming to do how it should be aiming to operate so just from a practical perspective that turns out to be just a more effective way to trade in the model That's one piece of it so that you know, it's the kind of rules versus principles trade off Then there's another thing you're talking about which is kind of like the core jubility versus um

Like you know, I would say kind of intransic motivation trade off which is like how much to the model be a kind of I don't know like a skin suit or something where you know, you know You just kind of you know It just kind of directly follows the instructions that are given to it by whoever is giving it those instructions

First is how much should the model have an inherent set of values and and go off and do things on its own

and and and and there I would actually say Everything about the model is actually closer to the direction of like You know, it should mostly do what people want it should mostly follow things. We're not trying to build something that like You know, goes off and runs the world on its own We're actually pretty far on the courageable side now now what we do say is

There are certain things that the model won't do right that it's like you know that that that I think we say it in various ways in the constitution that under normal circumstances

If someone asks the model to do a task you should do that task that that should be the default

But if you've asked it to do something dangerous or if you've you know if you've asked it to You know to kind of harm someone else Then the model is unwilling to do that. So I actually think of it as like a mostly

A mostly coragable model that has some limits, but those limits are based on principles Yeah, I mean then the fundamental question is how are those principles determined and this is not a special question for enthropic This would be a question for any property, but Because you have been the ones to actually Write down the principles. I get to ask you this question

Normally a constitution is like you write it down and it's set in stone and there's a process of So updating it and Changing it and so forth in this case it seems like a document that people in thropic right that can be changed at any time that Guides the behavior of systems are going to be the basis of a lot of economic activity

What is the how do you think about how how those principles should be set? Yes, um, so I think there's there's two there's maybe three

Three kind of sizes of loop here right three three ways to iterate one is you can iterate we iterate with in then Thropic we train the model we're not happy with it and we kind of change the constitution and I think that's good to do And you know putting out publicly, you know making updates to the constitution every once in a while saying here is a new constitution Right, I think that's good to do because people can comment on it

The second level of loop is different companies will have different constitutions

And you know, I think it's useful for like enthropic puts out a constitution and you know Gemini model puts out a constitution and you know other companies put out a constitution and then they're making kind of look at them Compare outside observers can critique and say this this I like this one This thing from this constitution and this thing from that constitution and then kind of that that creates some Kind of you know soft incentive and feedback for all the companies to like take the best of each elements and improve

Then I think there's a third loop which is you know society beyond the AI companies and beyond just those who kind of You know who who comment on the constitutions without hard power and and there you know We've done some experiments like you know a couple years ago

We did an experiment with I think it was called the collective intelligence project to like

You know to to basically pull people and ask them what should be in our AI constitution

And you know I think at the time we incorporated some of those changes and so you could imagine with the new approach We've taken to the constitution doing something like that

It's a little harder because it's like that was actually an easier approach t...

At the level of principle to ask to have a certain amount of coherence, but but you could you could still imagine getting views from a wide variety of people

And I think you could also imagine and this is like a crazy idea, but hey, you know this whole interview is about

Crazy ideas right so You know, you could even imagine Systems of kind of representative government having having input right like you know I wouldn't I wouldn't do this today because a legislative process is so slow like this is exactly why I I think we should be careful about the legislative process and AI regulation

But there's no reason you couldn't in principle say like you know all a I you know All AI models have to have a constitution that starts with like These things and then like you can append you can append other things after it

But like there has to be this special section that like takes present. I wouldn't do that that's too rigid that that sounds

You know that that that that that sounds kind of overly prescriptive in a way that I think overly aggressive Legislation is but like that is the thing you could you know like like that is that there's a thing you could try to do is there's some Much less heavy handed version of that maybe I really like control loop to Where obviously this is not how constitutions of actual governments do or should work where there's not this vague sense in which The Supreme Court will feel out how people are feeling and where the vives and then update the of the constitution accordingly

So there's yeah with actual governments. There's a more procedural process exactly but what you actually have a vision of competition between constitutions which is actually very reminiscent of how Some libertarian charter citizen people you used to talk about what an archipelago of different kinds of governments Just like and then there would be selection among them of who could operate the most effectively In which place people would be the happiest and in in a sense you're actually

Yeah, there's this vision. I'm I'm kind of recreating that. Yeah. Yeah, I look at the say you two be up archipelago

Again, you know, I think I think that vision has has

You know if things to recommend it and things that things that things that will kind of go wrong with it You know, I think I think it's a I think it's an interesting in some ways compelling vision But also things will go wrong with it that you hadn't that you hadn't imagined so you know I like loop two as well, but I I feel like the whole thing has got to be some Mix of loops one two and three and it's it's a matter of the proportion. Yeah, right. I think that's got to be the answer

When somebody eventually writes the equivalent of the making of the atomic bomb for this era What is the thing that will be hardest to glean for the historical record? They're they're most likely to miss I think a few things one is at every moment of this exponential The extent to which the world outside it didn't understand it This is this is a bias. It's often present in history where anything that actually happened looks inevitable in retrospect and and so

You know, I think when people When people look back it will be hard for them to put themselves in the place of People who are actually making a bet on this thing to happen that Wasn't inevitable that we had these arguments like the arguments that you know that I make for scaling or that Continual learning will be solved

You know that that You know some of us internally in our heads put a high probability on this happening, but but it's like there's there's a world outside us It's not that's not acting on it. It's not kind of not acting on that at all And and I think I think the the weirdness of it I think unfortunately like the insularity of it like you know

If we're one year or two years away from it, it happened like the average person on the street has no idea And that's one of the things I'm trying to change like with the memos with talking to policymakers But like I don't know I think I I think that's just a that's just like a crazy That's just like a crazy thing yeah Finally, I would say and and this probably applies to almost all historical moments of crisis

How absolutely faster was happening how everything was happening all at once and so decisions that you might think You know, we're kind of carefully calculated

Well actually you have to make that decision and then you have to make 30 other decisions on the on the same day

Because it's all happening so fast and and you don't even know which decisions are going to turn out to be consequential so You know one of my one of my I guess worries although it's also an insight into

You know in into kind of what's happening is that you know some very critical decision will be

Will be some decision that you know someone just comes into my office and is like Dario you have two minutes like you know should we should we do you know should we do thing thing A or thing B on this like You know Someone gives me this random you know half page half page memo and it's like should we should we do A or B And I'm like I don't know I have to eat lunch. Let's do B and and you know that ends up being the most consequential thing ever

Final question

it seems like you have

There's not text CEOs who are usually writing 50 page memos every few months and it seems like you have managed to build a rule for yourself and a company around you

Which is compatible with this more intellectual type roll a CEO And I want to understand how you construct that and how like how does that work to be You just go away for a couple of weeks and then you tell your company. This is the memo like

Here's what we're doing. It's also reported and you write a bunch of these internally. Yeah, so I mean for this particular one

You know, I wrote it over winter break So that was the type, you know, and I was having a hard time finding the time to actually find it to actually write it But I actually think about this in a broader way I actually think it relates to the culture of the company So I probably spend a third maybe 40% of my time making sure the culture of anthropic is good

As anthropic has gotten larger, it's gotten harder to just you know get involved in like you know directly involved in like the train of the models The launch of the models the building of the products like it's 2500 people. It's like you know, there's just You know, I have certain instincts, but like there's only you know It's very difficult to get to get involved in every single detail. You know, I like I try as much as possible But one thing that's very leverage is making sure and tropical is a good place to work

People like working there, everyone thinks that themselves as team members have one works together instead of against each other

And you know, we've seen as some of the other AI companies have grown without naming any names You know, we're starting to see decoherence and people fighting each other and you know, I would argue there was even a lot of that from the beginning But but you know that it's it's gotten worse, but I think we've done an extraordinarily good job even if not perfect of Holding the company together making everyone feel the mission that we're sincere about the mission

And that you know everyone has faith that everyone else there is working for the right reason that we're a team That people aren't trying to get ahead of each other's expense or backstab each other, which again And happens a lot at some of the other places And and how do you make that the case? I mean, it's a lot of things. You know, it's me. It's it's it's Dunyala Who you know runs the company day to day. It's the co-founders. It's the other people we hire

It's the environment who try to create but I think an important thing in the culture is

I

Some and just you know, so the other leaders as well, but especially me

Half to articulate what the company is about why it's doing what it's doing What its strategy is what its values are what its mission is and what it stands for and You know When you get to 2500 people you can't do that person by person you have to write or you have to speak to the whole company This is why I get up in front of the whole company every two weeks and speak for an hour

It's actually I mean, I wouldn't say I write essays internally. I do two things one I write this thing called a dvq Dario vision quest I wasn't the one who named it that that's the name it it received and it's one of these names that I kind of I tried to fight it because it made it sound like I was like going off and smoking pale to you or something

But but the name just stuck um, so I get up in front of the company Every two weeks. I have like a three or four page document and I just kind of talk through like three or four different topics about What's going on internally the you know the models were producing the products the outside industry The world as a whole as it relates to AI and geopolitically in general, you know, just some

Mix of that and I just go through very very honestly

I just go through when I just I just say you know this is this is what I'm thinking This is what anthropically leadership is thinking and then I answer questions and and that direct connection I think has a lot of value that is hard to achieve when you're passing things down the chain you know six six levels deep And you know

Large fraction of the company comes comes to attend either either in person or Either in person or virtually and it you know it really means that you can communicate a lot and And the other thing I do is I just you know I have a channel in Slack, or I just write a bunch of things and comment a lot and often that's in response to you know Just things I'm seeing at the company or questions people ask or like

You know we do internal surveys and there are things people are concerned about and so I'll write them up And I'm like I'm you know, I'm I'm just I'm very honest about these things you know I just I just say them very directly and the point is to get a reputation of telling the company The truth about what's happening to call things what they are to acknowledge Problems to avoid the sort of corpo speak the kind of defensive communication that often is necessary in public because you know the world is

Very large and full of people who are you know Interpreting things in bad faith But you know if you have a company of people who you trust and we try to hire people that we trust Then then you know you can you can you can you know you can you can really just be entirely unfiltered and you know

I think I think that's an enormous strength of the company.

It makes people more you know more of the sum of their parts and increases the likelihood that we accomplish the mission

Because everyone is on the same page about the mission and everyone is debating and discussing how it best to accomplish the mission

Well in lieu of an external adoration quest we have this interview

Did this interview is a little like that?

This is in front of you. Thanks for doing it. Yeah, thank you draw cash. Hey everybody. I hope you enjoyed that episode

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