Dario Amodei: belief

Transcript context

…I feel like diffusion is cope that people say. When the model isn’t able to do something, they’re like, “oh, but it’s a diffusion issue.” But then you should use the comparison to humans. You would think that the inherent advantages that AIs have would make diffusion a much easier problem for new AIs getting onboarded than new humans getting onboarded. An AI can read your entire Slack and your drive in minutes. They can share all the knowledge that the other copies of the same instance have. You don’t have this adverse selection problem when you’re hiring AI, so you can just hire copies of a vetted AI model. Hiring a human is so much more of a hassle. People hire humans all the time. We pay humans upwards of $50 trillion in wages because they’re useful, even though in principle it would be much easier to integrate AIs into the economy than it is to hire humans. The diffusion doesn’t really explain. I think diffusion is very real and doesn’t exclusively have to do with limitations on the AI models. Again, there are people who use diffusion as kind of a buzzword to say this isn’t a big deal. I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about how AI will diffuse at the speed of previous technologies. I think AI will diffuse much faster than previous technologies have, but not infinitely fast. I’ll just give an example of this. There’s Claude Code. Claude Code is extremely easy to set up. If you’re a developer, you can just start using Claude Code. There is no reason why a developer at a large enterprise should not be adopting Claude Code as quickly as an individual developer or developer at a startup. We do everything we can to promote it. We sell Claude Code to enterprises. Big enterprises, big financial companies, big pharmaceutical companies, all of them are adopting Claude Code much faster than enterprises typically adopt new technology. But again, it takes time. Any given feature or any given product, like Claude Code or Cowork, will get adopted by the individual developers who are on Twitter all the time, by the Series A startups, many months faster than they will get adopted by a large enterprise that does food sales. There are just a number of factors. You have to go through legal, you have to provision it for everyone. It has to pass security and compliance. The leaders of the company who are further away from the AI revolution are forward-looking, but they have to say, “Oh, it makes sense for us to spend 50 million. This is what this Claude Code thing is. This is why it helps our company. This is why it makes us more productive.” Then they have to explain to the people two levels below. They have to say, “Okay, we have 3,000 developers. Here’s how we’re going to roll it out to our developers.” We have conversations like this every day. We are doing everything we can to make Anthropic’s revenue grow 20 or 30x a year instead of 10x a year. Again, many enterprises are just saying, “This is so productive. We’re going to take shortcuts in our usual procurement process.” They’re moving much faster than when we tried to sell them just the ordinary API, which many of them use. Claude Code is a more compelling product, but it’s not an infinitely compelling product. I don’t think even AGI or powerful AI or “country of geniuses in a data center” will be an infinitely compelling product. It will be a compelling product enough maybe to get 3-5x, or 10x, a year of growth, even when you’re in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is extremely hard to do and has never been done in history before, but not infinitely fast. I buy that it would be a slight slowdown. Maybe this is not your claim, but sometimes people talk about this like, “Oh, the capabilities are there, but because of diffusion... otherwise we’re basically at AGI”.…

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