Anthropic co-founder on quitting OpenAI, AGI predictions, $100M talent wars, 20% unemployment, and the nightmare scenarios keeping him up at night | Ben Mann

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You wrote somewhere that creating powerful AI might be the last invention humanity ever needs to make. How much time do we have, Ben?

**Benjamin Mann** (0:06)
I think 50th percentile chance of hitting some kind of superintelligence is now like 2028

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:12)
What is it that you saw at OpenAI? What did you experience there that made you feel like, okay, we got to go do our own thing?

**Benjamin Mann** (0:17)
We felt like safety wasn't the top priority there. The case for safety has gotten a lot more concrete. So superintelligence is a lot about like, how do we keep God in the box and not let the God out?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
What are the odds that we align AI correctly?

**Benjamin Mann** (0:29)
Once we get to superintelligence, it will be too late to align the models. My best granularity forecast for like, could we have an X-risk or extremely bad outcome is somewhere between and 10%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:40)
Something that's in the news right now is this whole is that coming after all the top AI researchers.

**Benjamin Mann** (0:45)
We've been much less affected because people here, they get these offers and then they say, well, of course I'm not going to leave because my best case scenario at Meta is that we make money. And my best case scenario at Anthropic is we like affect the future of humanity.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:59)
Dario, your CEO, recently talked about how unemployment might go up to something like 20 percent.

**Benjamin Mann** (1:04)
If you just think about like 20 years in the future, where we're like way past the singularity, it's hard for me to imagine that even capitalism will look at all like it looks today.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:12)
Do you have any advice for folks that want to try to get ahead of this?

**Benjamin Mann** (1:15)
I'm not immune to job replacement either. At some point, it's coming for all of us.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:20)
Today my guest is Benjamin Mann. Holy moly, what a conversation. Ben is the co-founder of Anthropic. He serves as tech lead for product engineering. He focuses most of his time and energy on aligning AI to be helpful, harmless, and honest. Prior to Anthropic, he was one of the architects of GPT-3 at OpenAI. In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including his thoughts on the recruiting battle for top AI researchers, why he left OpenAI to start Anthropic, how soon he expects we'll see AGI, also his economic touring test for knowing when we've hit AGI, why scaling laws have not slowed down and are in fact accelerating, and what the current biggest bottlenecks are, why he's so deeply concerned with AI safety, and how he and Anthropic operationalized safety and alignment into the models that they build and into their ways of working, also how the existential risk from AI has impacted his own perspectives on the world and his own life, and what he's encouraging his kids to learn to succeed in an AI future. A huge thank you to Steve Nitsch, Danielle Giglieri, Raph Lee, and my newsletter community for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products, including Bolt, Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Granola and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Benjamin Mann. This episode is brought to you by Sauce. The way teams turn feedback into product impact is stuck in the past. Vague reports, static taxonomies, unactionable insights that don't move business metrics. The result? Turn, lost deals, misgrowth. Sauce is the AI product co-pilot that helps CPOs and product teams uncover business impact and act faster. It listens to your sales calls, support tickets, turn reasons and lost deals surfacing the biggest product issues and opportunities in real time. It then routes them to the right teams to turn signals into PRDs, prototypes and even code that drives revenue retention and adoption. That's why Whatnot, Linktree, IncidentIO and Zip use Sauce. One enterprise uncovered a product gap that unlocked $16 million ARR. Another caught a spiking issue and prevented millions insurance. You can too at sauce.app slash Lenny. Sauce built for AI product teams. Don't get left behind. This episode is brought to you by Lucid Link, the storage collaboration platform. You've built a great product, but how you show it through video, design and storytelling is what brings it to life. If your team works with large media files, videos, design assets, layered project files, you know how painful it can be to stay organized across locations. Files live in different places, you're constantly asking, is this the latest version? Creative work slows down while people wait for files to transfer. Lucid Link fixes this. It gives your team a shared space in the cloud that works like a local drive. Files are instantly accessible for anywhere. No downloading, no syncing and always up to date. That means producers, editors, designers and marketers can open massive files in their native apps, work directly from the cloud and stay aligned wherever they are. Teams at Adobe, Shopify and top creative agencies use Lucid Link to keep their content engine running fast and smooth. Try it for free at lucidlink.com/lenny. That's lucidlink.com/lenny.