Dario Amodei: belief

Transcript context

…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. And so Anthropic is this kind of clean experiment built on a foundation of what concretely AI safety should look like?…

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