Dario Amodei: prediction

Transcript context

…As we go towards a world of a full drop-in remote worker replacement, does an API pricing model still make the most sense? If not, what is the correct way to price AGI, or serve AGI? I think there’s going to be a bunch of different business models here, all at once, that are going to be experimented with. I actually do think that the API model is more durable than many people think. One way I think about it is if the technology is advancing quickly, if it’s advancing exponentially, what that means is there’s always a surface area of new use cases that have been developed in the last three months. Any kind of product surface you put in place is always at risk of sort of becoming irrelevant. Any given product surface probably makes sense for a range of capabilities of the model. The chatbot is already running into limitations where 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 the models are good enough and them getting better doesn’t matter to the economy. It doesn’t matter to that particular product. So I think the value of the API is that the API always offers an opportunity, very close to the bare metal, to build on what the latest thing is. There’s always going to be this front of new startups and new ideas that weren’t possible a few months ago and are possible because the model is advancing. I actually predict that 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 a different way. 100 of them become startups and ten of them become big successful startups. Two or three really end up being the way that people use the model 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. Not every token that’s output by the model is worth the same amount. Think about what is the value of the tokens that the model outputs when someone calls them up and says, “My Mac isn’t working,” or something, the model’s like, “restart it.” Someone hasn’t heard that before, but the model said that 10 million times. Maybe that’s worth like a dollar or a few cents or something. Whereas if the model goes to 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 the molecule. If you do that, wonderful things will happen.” Those tokens could be worth tens of millions of dollars. So I think we’re definitely going to see business models that recognize that. At some point we’re going to see “pay for results” in some form, or we may see forms of compensation that are like labor, that kind of work by the hour. I don’t know. I think because it’s a new industry, a lot of things are going to be tried. I don’t know what will turn out to be the right thing. 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. I don’t think in the history of startups there has been a single application that has been as hotly competed in as coding agents. Claude Code is a category leader here. That seems surprising to me. It doesn’t seem intrinsically that Anthropic had to build this. I wonder if you have an accounting of why it had to be Anthropic or how Anthropic ended up building an application in addition to the model underlying it that was successful.…

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