Dario Amodei: belief

Transcript context

…So what about 4.0? So how do you think, as these models get bigger and bigger, about versioning and also just versioning in general, why Sonnet 3.5 updated with the date? Why not Sonnet 3.6, which a lot of people are calling it? Naming is actually an interesting challenge here, right? Because I think a year ago, most of the model was pre-training. And so you could start from the beginning and just say, “Okay, we’re going to have models of different sizes. We’re going to train them all together and we’ll have a family of naming schemes and then we’ll put some new magic into them and then we’ll have the next generation.” The trouble starts already when some of them take a lot longer than others to train. That already messes up your time a little bit. But as you make big improvement in pre-training, then you suddenly notice, “Oh, I can make better pre-train model.” And that doesn’t take very long to do, but clearly it has the same size and shape of previous models. So I think those two together as well as the timing issues. Any kind of scheme you come up with, the reality tends to frustrate that scheme, right? It tends to break out of the scheme. It’s not like software where you can say, “Oh, this is 3.7, this is 3.8.” No, you have models with different trade-offs. You can change some things in your models, you can change other things. Some are faster and slower at inference. Some have to be more expensive, some have to be less expensive. And so I think all the companies have struggled with this. I think we were in a good position in terms of naming when we had Haiku, Sonnet and Opus. It was great, great start.…

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