Dario Amodei: belief

Transcript context

…form standard that everyone follows and to make sure that simply that the industry does what a majority of the industry has already said is important and has already said that they definitely will do. Right, some people, I think there’s a class of people who are against regulation on principle. I understand where that comes from. If you go to Europe and you see something like GDPR, you see some of the other stuff that they’ve done. Some of it’s good, but some of it is really unnecessarily burdensome and I think it’s fair to say really has slowed innovation. And so I understand where people are coming from on priors. I understand why people start from that position. But again, I think AI is different. If we go to the very serious risks of autonomy and misuse that I talked about just a few minutes ago, I think that those are unusual and they warrant an unusually strong response. And so I think it’s very important. Again, we need something that everyone can get behind. I think one of the issues with SB 1047, especially the original version of it was it had a bunch of the structure of RSPs, but it also had a bunch of stuff that was either clunky or that just would’ve created a bunch of burdens, a bunch of hassle and might even have missed the target in terms of addressing the risks. You don’t really hear about it on Twitter, you just hear about kind of people are cheering for any regulation. And then the folks who are against make up these often quite intellectually dishonest arguments about how it’ll make us move away from California, bill doesn’t apply if you’re headquartered in California, bill only applies if you do business in California, or that it would damage the open source ecosystem or that it would cause all of these things. I think those were mostly nonsense, but there are better arguments against regulation. There’s one guy, Dean Ball, who’s really, I think, a very scholarly analyst who looks at what happens when a regulation is put in place in ways that they can kind of get a life of their own or how they can be poorly designed. And so our interest has always been we do think there should be regulation in this space, but we want to be an actor who makes sure that that regulation is something that’s surgical, that’s targeted at the serious risks and is something people can actually comply with. Because something I think the advocates of regulation don’t understand as well as they could is if we get something in place that’s poorly targeted, that wastes a bunch of people’s time, what’s going to happen is people are going to say, “See, these safety risks, this is nonsense. I just had to hire 10 lawyers to fill out all these forms. I had to run all these tests for something that was clearly not dangerous.” ple are going to say, “See, these safety risks, this is nonsense. I just had to hire 10 lawyers to fill out all these forms. I had to run all these tests for something that was clearly not dangerous.” And after six months of that, there will be a ground swell and we’ll end up with a durable consensus against regulation. And so I think the worst enemy of those who want real accountability is badly designed regulation. We need to actually get it right. And if there’s one thing I could say to the advocates, it would be that I want them to understand this dynamic better and we need to be really careful and we need to talk to people who actually have experience seeing how regulations play out in practice. And the people who have seen that, understand to be very careful. If this was some lesser issue, I might be against regulation at all. But what I want the opponents to understand is that the underlying issues are actually serious. They’re not something that I or the other companies are just making up because of regulatory capture, they’re not sci-fi fantasies, they’re not any of these things. Every time we have a new model, every few months we measure the behavior of these models and they’re getting better and better at these concerning tasks just as they are getting better and better at good, valuable, economically useful tasks. And so I would just love it if some of the former, I think SB 1047 was very polarizing, I would love it if some of the most reasonable opponents and some of the most reasonable proponents would sit down together. And I think that the different AI companies, Anthropic was the only AI company that felt positively in a very detailed way. I think Elon tweeted briefly something positive, but some of the big ones like Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft were pretty staunchly against. So I would really is if some of the key stakeholders, some of the most thoughtful proponents and some of the most thoughtful opponents would sit down and say how do we solve this problem in a way that the proponents feel brings a real reduction in risk and that the opponents feel that it is not hampering the industry or hampering innovation any more necessary than it needs to. I think for whatever reason, that things got too polarized and those two groups didn’t get to sit down in the way that they should. And I feel urgency. I really think we need to do something in 2025. If we get to the end of 2025 and we’ve still done nothing about this, then I’m going to be worried. I’m not worried yet because, again, the risks aren’t here yet, but I think time is running short. And come up with something surgical, like you said.…

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