Amol Avasare: belief

Transcript context

…And you have better things to do. Who's going to spend time building Slack at a... That is not where value is going to accrue. And I think it also helps you see how sophisticated these things are. There's been teams thinking about these problems for a long time. Anyway, that's a whole other tangent. Just coming back to the values thing, I just want to highlight something here that's really important. A lot of people criticize Anthropic for talking about the dangers to humanity, throwing out all these numbers about jobs going away, just creating all this fear. And people think it's, "Oh, we're trying to raise money or we got to get people's attention or we're just trying to create headlines." But everything I've ever seen internally is always just this is what we believe in. We want people to know what it might be coming. Even if it isn't bad, we want people to understand, "Here's what might happen and we are trying to avoid it." And you might say, "Why is Anthropic even building AI if it's so dangerous?" And the understanding Ben shared is just like we think it's better that we go at this and try to build it the right way versus just stay out of it and just hope that nothing bad happens. Yeah. I think three things that come to mind there. First is I go back to something I said earlier, which is that we very much think about things from an exponential lens. And if you are thinking about things from a linear lens, you'll see the world very, very differently, right, because you look at where we are today and you're like, "Okay, but how much better can it be in two, three years?" I think if you're looking at it from an exponential lens and you understand how exponentials work, then you just realize that a lot of this stuff is actually going to be happening sooner than people think if you're looking at it from a linear lens. And then if you understand that there could be upsides and downsides and the range of outcomes here, I think we very much need to be talking about the downsides so we can avoid them and push towards the upsides. I think most people at the company are optimists. We're very optimistic about the future. I think it's just we understand the risk is like it is not a guaranteed that we end up in a good place. And not enough people are talking about the risks, I think, in productive ways and who have the know-how of the risks. I think there's people who may talk about the risks but are not in the game. And so they don't actually know fully. They're not surgical on what the specific risks are, but we're in the game, we understand what's happening. And so that's one piece. I think the second is, I think, we actually believe in this stuff more strongly than we say externally. So it is just such a key part of how we think internally that sometimes we just reword your statements because it's like people might just think we're being too over the top, but internally, that's how we think, and what we're putting out is a softer version of that at times. And then I think the third piece is going to what Ben said where we think a lot about driving the race to the top. And so it's like if you're not in the game and you're shouting from the sidelines, no one cares. It's just the reality of how the world works. No one really cares. If you're in the game and you're a leading player and what you're doing is working, you can influence people who are also in the game to take the right actions. And so that is the core of it. If we just pack up and go home, you have no influence on this thing. And if you stay in the game and you're like, commercially, you're doing great, and then you have ways to influence that, okay, these are the principles and put that into the conversation and make more people sort of believe in those things. I could talk to you forever, Amol, but two more questions just to round out the conversation and touch on some stuff that I've hinted at a number of times. One is I want to take us actually to failure corner because someone listening to this may be like, "All right, look at this guy just worked at all these amazing companies, cold email, the CPO at Anthropic, got a job, joined this rocket ship. It's all been up and to the right, just killing it constantly." What's a story from your career where things didn't work out when you failed and what did you learn from that experience?…

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