Daniela and Dario Amodei join us to discuss Anthropic: a new AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Anthropic's mission and research strategy

-Recent research and papers by Anthropic

-Anthropic's structure as a "public benefit corporation"

-Career opportunities

You can find the page for the podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2022/03/04/daniela-and-dario-amodei-on-anthropic/

Watch the video version of this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAA6PZkek4A

Careers at Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/#careers

Anthropic's Transformer Circuits research: https://transformer-circuits.pub/

Follow Anthropic on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnthropicAI

microCOVID Project: https://www.microcovid.org/

Follow Lucas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lucasfmperry

Have any feedback about the podcast? You can share your thoughts here:

www.surveymonkey.com/r/DRBFZCT

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

2:44 What was the intention behind forming Anthropic?

6:28 Do the founders of Anthropic share a similar view on AI?

7:55 What is Anthropic's focused research bet?

11:10 Does AI existential safety fit into Anthropic's work and thinking?

14:14 Examples of AI models today that have properties relevant to future AI existential safety

16:12 Why work on large scale models?

20:02 What does it mean for a model to lie?

22:44 Safety concerns around the open-endedness of large models

29:01 How does safety work fit into race dynamics to more and more powerful AI?

36:16 Anthropic's mission and how it fits into AI alignment

38:40 Why explore large models for AI safety and scaling to more intelligent systems?

43:24 Is Anthropic's research strategy a form of prosaic alignment?

46:22 Anthropic's recent research and papers

49:52 How difficult is it to interpret current AI models?

52:40 Anthropic's research on alignment and societal impact

55:35 Why did you decide to release tools and videos alongside your interpretability research

1:01:04 What is it like working with your sibling?

1:05:33 Inspiration around creating Anthropic

1:12:40 Is there an upward bound on capability gains from scaling current models?

1:18:00 Why is it unlikely that continuously increasing the number of parameters on models will lead to AGI?

1:21:10 Bootstrapping models

1:22:26 How does Anthropic see itself as positioned in the AI safety space?

1:25:35 What does being a public benefit corporation mean for Anthropic?

1:30:55 Anthropic's perspective on windfall profits from powerful AI systems

1:34:07 Issues with current AI systems and their relationship with long-term safety concerns

1:39:30 Anthropic's plan to communicate it's work to technical researchers and policy makers

1:41:28 AI evaluations and monitoring

1:42:50 AI governance

1:45:12 Careers at Anthropic

1:48:30 What it's like working at Anthropic

1:52:48 Why hire people of a wide variety of technical backgrounds?

1:54:33 What's a future you're excited about or hopeful for?

1:59:42 Where to find and follow Anthropic

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