Dario Amodei

Yeah. So I think that's a pretty useful direction. Again, it has a lot in common with constitutional AI. So again, another example of like a race to the top, right? We have something that's like, we think... a better and more responsible way of doing things. It's also a competitive advantage. Then others discover that it has advantages and then start to do that thing.

We then no longer have the competitive advantage, but it's good from the perspective that now everyone has adopted a

positive practice that others were not adopting and so our response to that as well looks like we need a new competitive advantage in order to keep driving this race upwards um so that's that's how i generally feel about that i also think every implementation of these things is different so you know there were some things in the model spec that were not in constitutional ai and so you know we you know we can always we can always adopt those things or you know at least learn from them um so again i think this is an example of like the positive dynamic that uh

that I think we should all want the field to have.

It is rather long.

Oh, yeah. I'm fully expecting to definitely be wrong about all the details. I might be just spectacularly wrong about the whole thing and people will laugh at me for years. That's just how the future works.

vision of this essay and um what key takeaways that people have yeah i have spent a lot of time in anthropic i spent a lot of effort on like you know how do we address the risks of ai right how do we think about those risks like we're trying to do a race to the top you know what that requires us to build all these capabilities and the capabilities are cool but you know

you know, we're, we're, we're like a big part of what we're trying to do is like, is like address the risks and the justification for that is like, well, you know, all these positive things, you know, the market is this very healthy organism, right? It's going to produce all the positive things, the risks. I don't know. We might mitigate them. We might not.

And so we can have more impact by trying to mitigate the risks. But I noticed that one flaw in that way of thinking is, And it's not a change in how seriously I take the risks. It's maybe a change in how I talk about them. Is that, you know, no matter how kind of logical or rational that line of reasoning that I just gave might be.

if you kind of only talk about risks, your brain only thinks about risks. And so I think it's actually very important to understand what if things do go well? And the whole reason we're trying to prevent these risks is not because we're afraid of technology, not because we want to slow it down. It's because...

if we can get to the other side of these risks, right, if we can run the gauntlet successfully to, you know, to put it in stark terms, then on the other side of the gauntlet are all these great things. And these things are worth fighting for. And these things can really inspire people. And,

I think I imagine because, look, you have all these investors, all these VCs, all these AI companies talking about all the positive benefits of AI. But as you point out, it's weird. There's actually a dearth of really getting specific about it. There's a lot of like...

Random people on Twitter, like posting these kind of like gleaming cities and this, this just kind of like vibe of like grind, accelerate harder, like kick out the decel, you know, it's, it's just this very, this very like aggressive ideological. Then you're like, well, what are you – what are you actually excited about?

And so I figured that – I think it would be interesting and valuable for someone who's actually coming from the risk side to try and really – Make a try at at explaining, explaining, explain what the benefits are, both because I think it's something we can all get behind. And I want people to understand. I want them to really understand that this isn't this isn't doomers versus accelerationists.

This this is. that if you have a true understanding of where things are going with AI, and maybe that's the more important axis, AI is moving fast versus AI is not moving fast, then you really appreciate the benefits and you really, you want humanity, our civilization to seize those benefits, but you also get very serious about anything that could derail them.

Maybe we're stuck with the terms and my efforts to change them are futile. It's admirable. I'll tell you what else I don't. This is like a pointless semantic point, but I, I keep talking about it. I'm just going to do it once more. Um, uh, I, I think it's a little like... Let's say it was like 1995 and Moore's Law is making the computers faster.

And for some reason, there had been this verbal tick that everyone was like, well, someday we're going to have supercomputers. And supercomputers are going to be able to do all these things that once we have supercomputers, we'll be able to sequence the genome. We'll be able to do other things. And so one, it's true. The computers are getting faster.

And as they get faster, they're going to be able to do all these great things. But there's like... There's no discrete point at which you had a supercomputer and previous computers were not. Supercomputer is a term we use, but it's a vague term to just describe computers that are faster than what we have today.

There's no point at which you pass a threshold and you're like, oh my God, we're doing a totally new type of computation. I feel that way about AGI. There's just a smooth exponential. If by AGI you mean AI is getting better and better and gradually it's

going to do more and more of what humans do until it's going to be smarter than humans, and then it's going to get smarter even from there, then yes, I believe in AGI. But if AGI is some discrete or separate thing, which is the way people often talk about it, then it's kind of a meaningless buzzword.