Dario Amodei: observation

Transcript context

…ually write it. But I think about this in a broader way. I think it relates to the culture of the company. 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 get directly involved in the training of the models, the launch of the models, the building of the products. It’s 2,500 people. I have certain instincts, but it’s very difficult to get involved in every single detail. I try as much as possible, but one thing that’s very leveraged is making sure Anthropic is a good place to work, people like working there, everyone thinks of themselves as team members, and everyone works together instead of against each other. We’ve seen as some of the other AI companies have grown—without naming any names—we’re starting to see decoherence and people fighting each other. I would argue there was even a lot of that from the beginning, but it’s gotten worse. 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 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 at each other’s expense or backstab each other, which again, I think happens a lot at some of the other places. How do you make that the case? It’s a lot of things. It’s me, it’s Daniela, who runs the company day to day, it’s the co-founders, it’s the other people we hire, it’s the environment we try to create. But I think an important thing in the culture is that the other leaders as well, but especially me, have 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. When you get to 2,500 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. 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 received, and it’s one of these names that I tried to fight because it made it sound like I was going off and smoking peyote or something. But the name just stuck. So I get up in front of the company every two weeks. I have a three or four-page document, and I just talk through three or four different topics about what’s going on internally, the models we’re producing, the products, the outside industry, the world as a whole as it relates to AI and geopolitically in general. Just some mix of that. I go through very honestly and I say, “This is what I’m thinking, and this is what Anthropic leadership is thinking,” and then I answer questions. That direct connection has a lot of value that is hard to achieve when you’re passing things down the chain six levels deep. A large fraction of the company comes to attend, either in person or virtually. It really means that you can communicate a lot. rd to achieve when you’re passing things down the chain six levels deep. A large fraction of the company comes to attend, either in person or virtually. It really means that you can communicate a lot. The other thing I do is I have a channel in Slack where I just write a bunch of things and comment a lot. Often that’s in response to things I’m seeing at the company or questions people ask. We do internal surveys and there are things people are concerned about, and so I’ll write them up. I’m just very honest about these things. I just say them very directly. 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 the world is very large and full of people who are interpreting things in bad faith. But if you have a company of people who you trust, and we try to hire people that we trust, then you can really just be entirely unfiltered. I think that’s an enormous strength of the company. It makes it a better place to work, it makes people more than 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 best to accomplish the mission. Well, in lieu of an external Dario Vision Quest, we have this interview.…

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