Dario Amodei: commitment

Transcript context

…When somebody eventually writes the equivalent of The Making of the Atomic Bomb for this era, what is the thing that will be hardest to glean from the historical record that they’re most likely to miss? I think a few things. One is, at every moment of this exponential, the extent to which the world outside it didn’t understand it. This is a bias that’s often present in history. Anything that actually happened looks inevitable in retrospect. When people look back, it will be hard for them to put themselves in the place of people who were actually making a bet on this thing to happen that wasn’t inevitable, that we had these arguments like the arguments I make for scaling or that continual learning will be solved. Some of us internally put a high probability on this happening, but there’s a world outside us that’s not acting on that at all. I think the weirdness of it, unfortunately the insularity of it... If we’re one year or two years away from it happening, the average person on the street has no idea. That’s one of the things I’m trying to change with the memos, with talking to policymakers. I don’t know but I think that’s just a crazy thing. Finally, I would say—and this probably applies to almost all historical moments of crisis—how absolutely fast it was happening, how everything was happening all at once. Decisions that you might think were carefully calculated, well actually you have to make that decision, and then you have to make 30 other decisions on the same day because it’s all happening so fast. You don’t even know which decisions are going to turn out to be consequential. One of my worries—although it’s also an insight into what’s happening—is that some very critical decision will be some decision where someone just comes into my office and is like, “Dario, you have two minutes. Should we do thing A or thing B on this?” Someone gives me this random half-page memo and asks, “Should we do A or B?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I have to eat lunch. Let’s do B.” That ends up being the most consequential thing ever. So final question. There aren’t tech CEOs who are usually writing 50-page memos every few months. It seems like you have managed to build a role for yourself and a company around you which is compatible with this more intellectual-type role of CEO. I want to understand how you construct that. How does that work? Do you just go away for a couple of weeks and then you tell your company, “This is the memo. Here’s what we’re doing”? It’s also reported that you write a bunch of these internally.…

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