Dario Amodei: evaluation

Transcript context

…One of the ways that Claude has been getting more and more powerful is it’s now able to do some agentic stuff, computer use. There’s also an analysis within the sandbox of Claude.ai itself. But let’s talk about computer use. That seems to me super exciting that you can just give Claude a task and it takes a bunch of actions, figures it out, and has access to the… … a bunch of actions, figures it out and has access to your computer through screenshots. So can you explain how that works and where that’s headed? Yeah. It’s actually relatively simple. So Claude has had for a long time, since Claude 3 back in March, the ability to analyze images and respond to them with text. The only new thing we added is those images can be screenshots of a computer and in response, we train the model to give a location on the screen where you can click and/or buttons on the keyboard, you can press in order to take action. And it turns out that with actually not all that much additional training, the models can get quite good at that task. It’s a good example of generalization. People sometimes say if you get to lower earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere because of how much it takes to escape the gravity well. If you have a strong pre-trained model, I feel like you’re halfway to anywhere in terms of the intelligence space. And so actually, it didn’t take all that much to get Claude to do this. And you can just set that in a loop, give the model a screenshot, tell it what to click on, give it the next screenshot, tell it what to click on and that turns into a full kind of almost 3D video interaction of the model and it’s able to do all of these tasks. We showed these demos where it’s able to fill out spreadsheets, it’s able to kind of interact with a website, it’s able to open all kinds of programs, different operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac. So I think all of that is very exciting. I will say, while in theory there’s nothing you could do there that you couldn’t have done through just giving the model the API to drive the computer screen, this really lowers the barrier. And there’s a lot of folks who either aren’t in a position to interact with those APIs or it takes them a long time to do. It’s just the screen is just a universal interface that’s a lot easier to interact with. And so I expect over time, this is going to lower a bunch of barriers. Now, honestly, the current model has, it leaves a lot still to be desired and we were honest about that in the blog. It makes mistakes, it misclicks. We were careful to warn people, “Hey, you can’t just leave this thing to run on your computer for minutes and minutes. You got to give this thing boundaries and guardrails.” And I think that’s one of the reasons we released it first in an API form rather than just hand the consumer and give it control of their computer. But I definitely feel that it’s important to get these capabilities out there. As models get more powerful, we’re going to have to grapple with how do we use these capabilities safely. How do we prevent them from being abused? it’s important to get these capabilities out there. As models get more powerful, we’re going to have to grapple with how do we use these capabilities safely. How do we prevent them from being abused? And I think releasing the model while the capabilities are still limited is very helpful in terms of doing that. I think since it’s been released, a number of customers, I think Replit was maybe one of the most quickest to deploy things, have made use of it in various ways. People have hooked up demos for Windows desktops, Macs, Linux machines. So yeah, it’s been very exciting. I think as with anything else, it comes with new exciting abilities and then with those new exciting abilities, we have to think about how to make the model safe, reliable, do what humans want them to do. It’s the same story for everything. Same thing. It’s that same tension.…

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