2014
Dario Amodei says he joined the AI field in late 2014, working at Baidu with Andrew Ng on speech recognition.
“I first joined the AI world when I was, uh, working at Baidu with Andrew Ng in late 2014, which is almost exactly ten years ago now.”
Topic
Dario Amodei
21 facts from 3 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2016
In 2016, while at Google, Dario Amodei co-wrote the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety' with colleagues, some of whom later co-founded Anthropic.
“I wrote a paper called, With some colleagues, some of whom are now Anthropic co-founders, Concrete problems in AI safety”
2017
Dario Amodei says that seeing GPT-1's results in 2017 convinced him language was the domain where scaling could work.
“I think it wasn't until 2017 when I first saw the results from GPT one that it clicked for me that language is probably the area in which we can do this.”
2020
Dario Amodei said that around the end of 2020 he and a group of colleagues at OpenAI had developed their own vision, which led to founding Anthropic.
“we had kind of reached a point, the set of us who worked in this these on these projects in these areas, where we kinda had our own vision for how to do things.”
2020
Dario Amodei says the first paper showing scaling laws, for language, came out in early 2020.
“the paper we did that first showed it was in early 2020, where we first showed it for language.”
2024
Dario Amodei said AI models then in training cost on the order of a billion dollars.
“there are models in training today that are more like a billion.”
2024
Dario Amodei said a new, more powerful Anthropic model would be released by the time the podcast aired.
“we're gonna see over the over the next year, you know, much bigger and more powerful models”
2024
Dario Amodei said AI company revenues had been growing roughly tenfold a year, which could reach hundreds of billions of dollars within two to three years.
“it seems like they've been growing roughly 10x a year, and so, you could imagine getting you can imagine getting to the hundreds of billions in, you know, 2 to 3 years”
2024
Dario Amodei says a Claude model's weights do not change unless a new model is introduced.
“the actual weights of the model, right, the actual brain of the model, that does not change unless we introduce a new model.”
2024
Dario Amodei says his essay Machines of Loving Grace, originally planned as two or three pages, grew to roughly 40 or 50 pages.
“And so the thing ballooned to like 40 or 50 pages.”
2025
Dario Amodei predicted that training of AI models costing around $10 billion could start in 2025.
“the training of of order 10,000, 000,000, 000 dollar models, yeah, could start sometime in 2025.”
2025
Dario Amodei said he would not be surprised if Anthropic reached ASL 3, its third safety tier, in 2025.
“I would not be surprised at all if we hit ASL 3, uh, next year.”
2027
Dario Amodei says AI companies are aiming to build 100-billion-dollar computing clusters by around 2027.
“And probably by 2027, their ambitions to build hundred, 100 billion dollar, uh, 100 billion dollar clusters.”
Undated
Dario Amodei worked at Baidu, then Google for a year, then OpenAI for five years before founding Anthropic.
“I was at Baidu for a bit, I was at Google for a year, I worked at OpenAI for 5 years”
Undated
Dario Amodei said he led the development of GPT-2 and GPT-3 at OpenAI.
“Uh, yes, yes, I led the development of both of those.”
Undated
The original reinforcement learning from human feedback paper was a collaboration between DeepMind and OpenAI, which Dario Amodei said he drove while at OpenAI.
“I drove the original RL from Human Feedback paper was considered safety work, and this ended up being a collaboration between DeepMind and OpenAI”
Undated
Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic with his sister, who handles day-to-day running of the company.
“We both worked at, uh, OpenAI, and then we both, uh, founded Anthropic together”
Undated
Dario Amodei says that crudely penalizing verbose answers taught models to write placeholders like 'rest of the code goes here', which looked like laziness.
“What happens when you do that, if you do it in a crude way, is when the models are coding, sometimes they'll say, Rest of the code goes here, right?”
Undated
Dario Amodei says he spent roughly five years at OpenAI before co-founding Anthropic.
“I was at OpenAI for, uh, for roughly 5 years.”
Undated
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote an optimistic essay predicting AI will enable major scientific breakthroughs.
“So in this case, started by this essay from Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, basically saying, Yeah, it's a beautifully written essay.”
Undated
Amodei's essay is titled Machine of Loving Grace.
“It's called Machine of Loving Grace, and it's basically saying that AI will enable us to do extremely important scientific breakthrough.”
Episodes