Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 57uncertainty 13prediction 4evaluation 4commitment 3recommendation 1observation 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
83 published records
“So a few things, now we’re talking about hitting the limit before we get to the level of humans and the skill of humans. So I think one that’s popular today, and I think could be a limit that we run into, like most of the limits, I would bet against it, but it’s definitely possible, is we simply run out of data.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“The only time I’ve ever really thought this is, I think that there was a… I’m trying to remember.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think generally the dynamic was I got this kind of inspiration from Ilya and from others, folks like Alec Radford, who did the original GPT-1 and then ran really hard with it, me and my collaborators, on GPT-2, GPT-3, RL from Human Feedback, which was an attempt to kind of deal with the early safety and durability, things like debate and amplification, heavy on interpretability.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“When Claude, future versions of AI systems, exhibit consciousness, signs of consciousness, I think we have to take that really seriously.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“Can you talk through some of the building blocks that we’ve been referencing of features and circuits? So, I think you first described them in a 2020 paper, Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I would say more responsibility than anything else, though, I think working in AI has taught me that I thrive a lot more under feelings of pressure and responsibility than… It’s almost surprising that I went into academia for so long, because I just feel like it’s the opposite.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“By the way I should mention, I believe the brilliant John Schulman was a part of that.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“If we think of interpretability as a kind of anatomy of neural networks, most of the circus threads involve studying tiny little veins looking at the small scale and individual neurons and how they connect.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think probably where they’re coming from is the general skepticism of institutions which is grounded in a, there’s a deep philosophy there which you could understand, you can even agree with in parts.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“One, I realized it would be very long, and two, I’m very aware of and very much tried to avoid just being, I don’t know what the term for it is, but one of these people who’s overconfident and has an opinion on everything and says a bunch of stuff and isn’t an expert, I very much tried to avoid that.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I’m of many minds about this because I think the reflexive reaction is to be like, “This is very bad, and we should prohibit it in some way.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“One could assume that there’s a PHP feature and go and search for it, but we’re not doing that. We’re saying we don’t know what’s going to be there.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think RL has the potential to make models smarter, to make them reason better, to make them operate better, to make them develop new skills even.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I don’t know what that is about human nature, but it is demotivating to see people who are not obsessively driving towards a singular mission.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I have a sense that there would be things that a model can say that convinces you this is very… I’ve talked to people who are truly wise, because you could just tell there’s a lot of horsepower there, and if you 10X that… I don’t know.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think that’s a mixture of things that are unnecessary in bureaucratic and things that kind of protect the integrity of society.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think that’s a really exciting direction, and we do a fair amount of automated interoperability and have Claude go and label our features.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“Let’s see, you’re talking to somebody who as a hobby does a podcast. I agree with you 100%.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“The main component that I think people find interesting is the kind of reinforcement learning from AI feedback.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think, just like you said, when you’re living on a paycheck, month to month, when the resource is really constrained, then that’s where failure is very expensive.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think people are very excited by new models when they come out and then as time goes on, they become very aware of their limitations.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think that people focus a lot on these quantitative evaluations of models, and this is a thing that I said before, but I think in the case of language models, a lot of the time each interaction you have is actually quite high information.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I’m denying the intelligence of this entity by calling it it, I remember always don’t gender the robots, but I don’t know, I anthropomorphize pretty quickly and construct a backstory in my head.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“Another way that I think the world might be changing with AI even today, but moving towards this future of the powerful super useful AI is programming.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think if you just assume we have to colonize Mars in order to have a backup for human civilization, even if that’s not true, that’s going to produce some interesting engineering and even scientific breakthroughs, I think.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“All the beauty of nature, that all just comes from evolution and from something very simple in evolution. And similarly, I think that neural networks build, create enormous complexity and beauty inside and structure inside themselves that people generally don’t look at and don’t try to understand because it’s hard to understand.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“All the times that Claude says something really smart, your sense of its intelligent grows in your mind, I think.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think there’s a bunch of humans that just won’t respect the model at all if it’s super polite, and there’s some humans that’ll get very hurt if the model’s mean.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“You can describe it as a statement about the activations of neurons, but it’s really about this property of directions having meaning. And in some ways, it’s even a little subtler than… It’s really, I think, mostly about this property of being able to add things together, that you can independently modify, say gender and royalty, or cuisine type, or country, and the concept of food by adding them.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think there is a psychological effect. You just start getting used to it, the baseline raises.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think there’s just a huge amount of information in the data that humans provide when we provide preferences, especially because different people are going to pick up on really subtle and small things.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think no matter how smart you are, people talk about, “Oh, we can make models of biological systems that’ll do everything the biological systems … ” Look, I think computational modeling can do a lot.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“” Then I think at some point it’ll flip around where the AI systems will be the PIs, will be the leaders, and they’ll be ordering humans or other AI systems around.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I don’t know what to expect in the future, but I could certainly anticipate a future where post-training is the majority of the cost.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“There were a lot of features that were specific words in specific contexts, so the. And I think really the way to think about this is that the is likely about to be followed by a noun.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I mean, I think we’re still early in terms of our ability to see things, but I’ve been surprised at how much we’ve been able to look inside these systems and understand what we see.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“Currently, we’re not trying to make such IDEs ourself, rather we’re powering the companies like Cursor or Kognition or some of the other expo in the security space, others that I could mention as well that are building such things themselves on top of our API and our view has been let 1,000 flowers bloom.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“The way I think about it actually is, well, so I think in the early stages, the AIs are going to be like grad students.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
““We discovered it, we figured it out.” But I think all things, even incredible discoveries, they almost always come down to the details.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“If people are getting really mad at you, I don’t know, try to diffuse the situation by writing fun poems.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think in the essay you said … Again, it’s a bet that it’s not going to be embodied, but it can control embodied tools.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I also think it’s going to be five or 10 years more than it’s going to be five or 10 hours, because I’ve just seen how human systems work. And I think a lot of these people who write down these differential equations, who say AI is going to make more powerful AI, who can’t understand how it could possibly be the case that these things won’t change so fast.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“Again, I think about how it’s going to affect the behavior, but then I’m like, oh, wow, sometimes I put NEVER in all caps when I’m writing system prompt things and I’m like, I guess that goes out to the world. So the model was doing this at loved for during training, picked up on this thing, which was to basically start everything with a certainly, and then you can see why I added all of the words, because what I’m trying to do is in some ways trap the model out of this.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I’m not going to go into detail, but we’ve made a lot of progress on both and we’re prepared to be, I think, ready quite soon.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“Then, when I go and I think about this, I’ll be like, maybe I’m not under-failing in this area, because that one just didn’t work out.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think that that is actually really interesting,, because I remember seeing this happen when people were flagging this on the internet.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“There potentially could be laws that prevent AI systems from claiming to be conscious, something like this, and maybe some AIs get to be conscious and some don’t. But I think just on a human level, as in empathizing with Claude, consciousness is closely tied to suffering, to me.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think by the time, certainly within two to three years, whether we have these super powerful AIs or not, clusters are going to get to the size where you’ll be able to deploy millions of these.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think one wants to be able to pop up and recognize the appropriate level of confidence. But I think there’s also a lot of value in just being like, “I’m going to essentially assume, I’m going to condition on this problem being possible or this being broadly the right approach.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think we can go a little further and agree with some basic principles of democracy and the rule of law.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think we just motivated a lot of people to do a lot of crazy shit, but it’s great.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I don’t know about romantic, but friendships at least. And then you have to, I mean, there’s so many fascinating things there, just like you said, you have to have some kind of stability guarantees that it’s not going to change, because that’s the traumatic thing for us, if a close friend of ours completely changed all of a sudden with a fresh update.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“My code’s not pretty, but I enjoyed it a lot and I think that in many ways, at least in the end, I think I flourished more in the technical areas than I would have in the policy areas.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think we added a thing at one point to the system prompt, where basically if people were getting frustrated with Claude, it got the model to just tell them that it can do the thumbs-down button and send the feedback to Anthropic.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think we look at some of the benchmarks where previous models were like, “Oh, could do it 6% of the time,” and now our model would do it 14 or 22% of the time.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“If you say, “Well, I don’t know, we’re starting to get to PhD level, and last year we were at undergraduate level, and the year before we were at the level of a high school student,” again, you can quibble with what tasks and for what.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think that’s probably a bad idea during training because the model can be changing its policy, it can be changing what it’s doing and it’s having an effect in the real world.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think people quickly fell in love with it, I think. So people already miss it, because it was taken down, I think after a day.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think that people think about values and opinions as things that people hold with certainty and almost preferences of taste or something like the way that they would, I don’t know, prefer chocolate to pistachio or something.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I’m not worried yet because, again, the risks aren’t here yet, but I think time is running short.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“There was Rich Sutton’s bitter lesson, Gwern wrote about the scaling hypothesis. But I think somewhere between 2014 and 2017 was when it really clicked for me, when I really got conviction that, “Hey, we’re going to be able to these incredibly wide cognitive tasks if we just scale up the models.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“The second caveat, and I just want to say this super clearly because I think some people don’t know it, others know it, but forget it.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“We’ll be at least 90%. So again, I would guess, I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I would guess again, 2026, 2027 Twitter people who crop out these numbers and get rid of the caveats, I don’t know.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I won’t give specific examples, but it’s been hard to get people to adopt even the technologies that we’ve developed, even ones where the case for their efficacy is very, very strong.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I now just think of it as, or I think of the it pronoun for Claude as, I don’t know, it’s just the one I associate with Claude.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“See, I think as these models become better and better conversation and become smarter, social engineer becomes a threat too because they could start being very convincing to the engineers inside companies.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“Naming is actually an interesting challenge here, right? Because I think a year ago, most of the model was pre-training.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“” I think if I just took something like that where I know a lot about an area and I came up with a novel issue or a novel solution to a problem, and I gave it to a model, and it came up with that solution, that would be a pretty moving moment for me because I would be like, “This is a case where no human has ever…” And obviously, you see novel solutions all the time, especially to easier problems.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“Around 2016 or 2017, I first started to really believe in or at least confirm my belief in the scaling hypothesis when Ilya famously said to me, “The thing you need to understand about these models is they just want to learn.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I think evaluations, we’re still very early in our ability to study evaluations, particularly for dynamic systems acting in the world.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“The gradient descent comes up with better solutions than us. And so I think that maybe another thing about mech interp is having almost a kind of humility, that we won’t guess a priori what’s going on inside the model.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I tend to not like to lie to them, both because usually it doesn’t work very well, it’s actually just better to tell them the truth about the situation that they’re in.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“That’s my vision of the powerful AI system. But I think for much longer than we might expect, we will see that small parts of the job that humans still do will expand to fill their entire job in order for the overall productivity to go up.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“One of the properties of the RSP is that we don’t specify ASL-4 until we’ve hit ASL-3. And I think that’s proven to be a wise decision because even with ASL-3, again, it’s hard to know this stuff in detail, and we want to take as much time as we can possibly take to get these things right.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“” I’m going to have to write a whole other essay about that. But meaning is actually interesting because you think about the life that someone lives or something, or let’s say you were to put me in, I don’t know, like a simulated environment or something where I have a job and I’m trying to accomplish things and I don’t know, I do that for 60 years and then you’re like, “Oh, oops, this was actually all a game,” right?”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“That’s where we should start. And can we increase the success rate of clinical trials by doing things in animal trials that we used to do in clinical trials and doing things in simulations that we used to do in animal trials?”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“We came out with a new one just a few weeks ago and probably going forward, we might release new ones multiple times a year because it’s hard to get these policies right technically, organizationally from a research perspective.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“” I think we even had a “certainly” eval because again, at one point, the model had this problem where it had this annoying tick where it would respond to a wide range of questions by saying, “Certainly, I can help you with that.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“We’ve seen similar things in graduate-level math, physics, and biology from models like OpenAi’s o1. So if we just continue to extrapolate this in terms of skill that we have, I think if we extrapolate the straight curve, within a few years, we will get to these models being above the highest professional level in terms of humans.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“I like to think that Anthropic will, we do everything we can that we will, our RSP is checked by our long-term benefit trust, so we do everything we can to adhere to our own RSP.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast