Dario Amodei: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, so look, I’m going to put things this way and I think it ties to the race to the top, which is in my time at OpenAI, what I come to see as I’d come to appreciate the scaling hypothesis and as I’d come to appreciate kind of the importance of safety along with the scaling hypothesis. The first one I think OpenAI was getting on board with. The second one in a way had always been part of OpenAI’s messaging. But over many years of the time that I spent there, I think I had a particular vision of how we should handle these things, how we should be brought out in the world, the kind of principles that the organization should have. And look, there were many, many discussions about should the company do this, should the company do that? There’s a bunch of misinformation out there. People say we left because we didn’t like the deal with Microsoft. False. Although, it was like a lot of discussion, a lot of questions about exactly how we do the deal with Microsoft. We left because we didn’t like commercialization. That’s not true. We built GPD-3, which was the model that was commercialized. I was involved in commercialization. It’s more, again, about how do you do it? Civilization is going down this path to very powerful AI. What’s the way to do it? That is cautious, straightforward, honest, that builds trust in the organization and in individuals. How do we get from here to there and how do we have a real vision for how to get it right? How can safety not just be something we say because it helps with recruiting. And I think at the end of the day, if you have a vision for that, forget about anyone else’s vision. I don’t want to talk about anyone else’s vision. If you have a vision for how to do it, you should go off and you should do that vision. It is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else’s vision. You might think they’re not doing it the right way. You might think they’re dishonest. Who knows? Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. But what you should do is you should take some people you trust and you should go off together and you should make your vision happen. And if your vision is compelling, if you can make it appeal to people, some combination of ethically in the market, if you can make a company that’s a place people want to join, that engages in practices that people think are reasonable while managing to maintain its position in the ecosystem at the same time, if you do that, people will copy it. a place people want to join, that engages in practices that people think are reasonable while managing to maintain its position in the ecosystem at the same time, if you do that, people will copy it. And the fact that you are doing it, especially the fact that you’re doing it better than they are, causes them to change their behavior in a much more compelling way than if they’re your boss and you’re arguing with them. I don’t know how to be any more specific about it than that, but I think it’s generally very unproductive to try and get someone else’s vision to look like your vision. It’s much more productive to go off and do a clean experiment and say, “This is our vision, this is how we’re going to do things. Your choice is you can ignore us, you can reject what we’re doing or you can start to become more like us.” And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And that plays out in the behavior of customers, that plays out in the behavior of the public, that plays out in the behavior of where people choose to work. And again, at the end, it’s not about one company winning or another company winning. If we or another company are engaging in some practice that people find genuinely appealing, and I want it to be in substance, not just an appearance and I think researchers are sophisticated and they look at substance, and then other companies start copying that practice and they win because they copied that practice. That’s great. That’s success. That’s like the race to the top. It doesn’t matter who wins in the end as long as everyone is copying everyone else’s good practices. One way I think of it is the thing we’re all afraid of is the race to the bottom and the race to the bottom doesn’t matter who wins because we all lose. In the most extreme world, we make this autonomous AI that the robots enslave us or whatever. That’s half joking, but that is the most extreme thing that could happen. Then it doesn’t matter which company was ahead. If instead you create a race to the top where people are competing to engage in good practices, then at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who ends up winning, it doesn’t even matter who started the race to the top. ate a race to the top where people are competing to engage in good practices, then at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who ends up winning, it doesn’t even matter who started the race to the top. The point isn’t to be virtuous, the point is to get the system into a better equilibrium than it was before. And individual companies can play some role in doing this. Individual companies can help to start it, can help to accelerate it. And frankly, I think individuals at other companies have done this as well. The individuals that when we put out an RSP react by pushing harder to get something similar done at other companies, sometimes other companies do something that’s we’re like, “Oh, it’s a good practice. We think that’s good. We should adopt it too.” The only difference is I think we try to be more forward leaning. We try and adopt more of these practices first and adopt them more quickly when others invent them. But I think this dynamic is what we should be pointing at and that I think it abstracts away the question of which company’s winning, who trusts who. I think all these questions of drama are profoundly uninteresting and the thing that matters is the ecosystem that we all operate in and how to make that ecosystem better because that constrains all the players.…

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