#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company that created Claude that is currently and often at the top of most LLM benchmark leaderboards. On top of that, Dario and the Anthropic team have been outspoken advocates for taking the topic of AI safety very seriously. And they have continued to publish a lot of fascinating AI research on this and other topics. I'm also joined afterwards by two other brilliant people from Anthropic. First, Amanda Askell, who is a researcher working on alignment and fine-tuning of Claude, including the design of Claude's character and personality. A few folks told me she has probably talked with Claude more than any human at Anthropic. So she was definitely a fascinating person to talk to about prompt engineering and practical advice on how to get the best out of Claude. After that, Chris Olah stopped by for a chat. He's one of the pioneers of the field of mechanistic interpretability, which is an exciting set of efforts that aims to reverse engineer neural networks, to figure out what's going on inside, inferring behaviors from neural activation patterns inside the network. This is a very promising approach for keeping future super-intelligent AI systems safe. For example, by detecting from the activations when the model is trying to deceive the human it is talking to. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Encore for machine learning, Notion for machine learning-powered note-taking and team collaboration, Shopify for selling stuff online, BetterHelp for your mind, and Element for your health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, or just want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Enchord, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation and management, and for model evaluation. We talk a little bit about public benchmarks in this podcast. I think mostly focused on software engineering, Sweet Bench. There's a lot of exciting developments about how do you have a benchmark that you can't cheat on. But if it's not public, then you can use it the right way, which is to evaluate how well is the annotation, the data curation, the training, the pre-training, the post-training, all of that. How's that working? Anyway, a lot of the fascinating conversation with the Anthropic folks was focused on the language side. And there's a lot of really incredible work that Encore is doing about annotating and organizing visual data. And they make it accessible for searching, for visualizing, for granular curation, all that kind of stuff. So I'm a big fan of data. It continues to be the most important thing. The nature of data and what it means to be good data, whether it's human generated or synthetic data, keeps changing, but it continues to be the most important component of what makes for a generally intelligent system, I think. And also for specialized intelligent systems as well. Go try out Encore to curate, annotate and manage your AI data at encore.com/lex. That's encore.com/lex.
This episode is brought to you by the thing that keeps getting better and better and better, Notion. It used to be an awesome note taking tool. Then it started being a great team collaboration. So note taking for many people and management of all kinds of other project stuff across large teams. Now, more and more and more is becoming a AI super powered note taking and team collaboration tool. Really integrating AI probably better than any note taking tool I've used. Not even close, honestly. Notion is truly incredible. I haven't gotten a chance to use Notion on a large team. I imagine that that's real when it begins to shine. But on a small team, it's just really, really, really amazing. The integration of the AI assistant inside a particular file for summarization, for generation, all that kind of stuff. But also the integration of an AI assistant to be able to ask questions about, you know, across docs, across wikis, across projects, across multiple files, to be able to summarize everything, maybe investigate project progress based on all the different stuff going on in different files. So really, really nice integration of AI. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com/lex, to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I keep wanting to mention Shopify's CEO, Toby, who's brilliant and I'm not sure why he hasn't been on the podcast yet. I need to figure that out. Every time I'm in San Francisco, I want to talk to him. So he's brilliant on all kinds of domains, not just entrepreneurship or tech, just philosophy and life, just his way of being. Plus an accent adds to the flavor profile of the conversation. I've been watching a cooking show for a little bit. Really, I think my first cooking show, it's called Class Wars. It's a South Korean show where chefs with Michelin stars compete against chefs without Michelin stars. And there's something about one of the judges that just, just the charisma and the way that he describes every single detail of flavor, of texture, of what makes for a good dish. Yeah. So it's contagious. I don't really even care. I'm not a foodie. I don't care about food in that way, but he makes me want to care. So anyway, that's why I use the term flavor profile, referring to tobi, which has nothing to do with what I should probably be saying. And that is that you should use Shopify. I've used Shopify. Super easy. Create a store, lexfridman.com/store to sell a few shirts. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It's for individuals. It's for couples. It's easy, discreet, affordable, available worldwide. I saw a few books by a Jungian psychologist. I was in a delirious state of sleepiness and I forgot to write his name down, but I need to do some research. I need to go back. I need to go back to my younger self when I dreamed of being a psychiatrist and reading Sigmund Freud and reading Carl Jung and reading it the way young kids maybe read comic books. They were my superheroes of sorts. Camus as well, Kafka, Nietzsche, Hesse, Dostoevsky, the sort of 19th and 20th century literary philosophers of sorts. Anyway, I need to go back to that. Maybe have a few conversations about Freud. Anyway, those folks, even if in part wrong or true revolutionaries, were truly brave to explore the mind in the way they did. They showed the power of talking and delving deep into the human mind, into the shadow through the use of words. So, highly recommend and BetterHelp is a super easy way to start. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.