Jack Clark: belief

Transcript context

…I used the phrase AGI, and not one of the five even knew what I meant. I don’t mean they were skeptical in the deep sense, which maybe one should be. They just literally didn’t know what I meant. What’s your model of why so many people are still in a fog? I am a technological pessimist who became an optimist through repeated beatings over the head of scale. What I mean by this is, I’ve consistently underestimated AI progress. Maybe I am today in this conversation when I talk about 3 percent to 5 percent growth rates. What has happened is, I have just endlessly seen the AI system get to where I thought it couldn’t, or thought would take a long time, much faster than I thought. So, I’ve had to internalize this repeatedly. Nonetheless, we, ourselves, find it surprising. Last year here people were saying, “Oh, well soon Claude is going to be doing most of the coding at Anthropic.” We’re now on the way to that, where Claude Code and other things are writing tons of code here. It still felt surprising internally even though we have docs from last year predicting it would happen about now. Most people outside of the AI labs have no experience of pre-registering their predictions about AI and getting it proved wrong to them repeatedly, because why would you do this unless you work here? I found that the only way to break through is to take their domain and show them what AI can do directly in the domain, which they can evaluate it within, which is an expensive process. Silicon Valley up until now has been age of the nerds. Do you feel that time is over, and it’s now era of the — I don’t know — humanities majors —…

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