Dario Amodei: belief

Transcript context

…I honestly don’t know how to think about this because there are people who qualitatively report what you’re saying. I’m sure you saw last year, there was a major study where they had experienced developers try to close pull requests in repositories that they were familiar with. Those developers reported an uplift. They reported that they felt more productive with the use of these models. But in fact, if you look at their output and how much was actually merged back in, there was a 20% downlift. They were less productive as a result of using these models. So I’m trying to square the qualitative feeling that people feel with these models versus, 1) in a macro level, where is this renaissance of software? And then 2) when people do these independent evaluations, why are we not seeing the productivity benefits we would expect? Within Anthropic, this is just really unambiguous. We’re under an incredible amount of commercial pressure and make it even harder for ourselves because we have all this safety stuff we do that I think we do more than other companies. The pressure to survive economically while also keeping our values is just incredible. We’re trying to keep this 10x revenue curve going. There is zero time for bullshit. There is zero time for feeling like we’re productive when we’re not. These tools make us a lot more productive. Why do you think we’re concerned about competitors using the tools? Because we think we’re ahead of the competitors. We wouldn’t be going through all this trouble if this were secretly reducing our productivity. We see the end productivity every few months in the form of model launches. There’s no kidding yourself about this. The models make you more productive. 1) People feeling like they’re productive is qualitatively predicted by studies like this. But 2) if I just look at the end output, obviously you guys are making fast progress. But the idea was supposed to be that with recursive self-improvement, you make a better AI, the AI helps you build a better next AI, et cetera, et cetera. What I see instead—if I look at you, OpenAI, DeepMind—is that people are just shifting around the podium every few months. Maybe you think that stops because you’ve won or whatever. But why are we not seeing the person with the best coding model have this lasting advantage if in fact there are these enormous productivity gains from the last coding model.…

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