Weekend Listen: Anthropic's Co-Founder and Top Economist on Doing Research at the AI Frontier

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Wiesenthal.

**Tracy Allaway** (0:23)
And I'm Tracy Allaway.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (0:24)
Tracy, I don't know, I think our listeners like it, but a lot of our episodes are about AI these days. But to be fair to us, it's a pretty big topic.

**Tracy Allaway** (0:32)
That's all anyone wants to talk about. Whenever we go to dinners with sources and things, and people who are not even directly in the tech industry, they might be in market, they might be in policy and economics, all they want to talk about is AI. And then inevitably, the conversation will go years into very sci-fi-y territory, where we all start talking about the human extinction scenario. And that's just the norm nowadays.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (0:53)
I know, it's so weird. We were in Hong Kong recently, and when we were in Hong Kong, this was before it was announced that there was a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz. And East Asia was considered to be like ground zero for where the effects would be felt of the oil and jet fuel crisis, et cetera. And we were at this dinner with business people. Like, they were not talking about that at all.

**Tracy Allaway** (1:12)
No, they want to talk about the Terminator scenario.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (1:14)
They just want to talk about token consumption and all of these things. Like, here we are. It's like, wait, aren't you guys supposed to be, like, under all kinds of jet fuel stress? So this is our defense for thinking AI is a pretty big deal.

**Tracy Allaway** (1:25)
For doing constant AI episodes. I think it's fair. I will also say, when we did the quiz in Hong Kong, we had a bunch of different teams with very creative games separated by tables.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (1:35)
Low value human capital.

**Tracy Allaway** (1:36)
That was a great one.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (1:37)
They won the quiz.

**Tracy Allaway** (1:37)
They won, proving that there is value in human capital. But did you see that one of the tables was called Fable 13?

**Joe Wiesenthal** (1:46)
Well, there you go.

**Tracy Allaway** (1:46)
Fable 13, Fable 13

**Joe Wiesenthal** (1:47)
I missed that.

**Tracy Allaway** (1:48)
Was very topical at that moment.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (1:50)
Very topical. We're recording this on June 17th. Of course, there's a lot in the news these days. But things move very fast in AI. Even if there weren't governmental controversies and all that stuff, you would have to mark the date in AI because of how fast breakthroughs happen. But as you said, AI feels like the most important thing than anything else. But that's a very conventional wisdom thing. It was not always conventional wisdom. I have a DM. I know you're not supposed to share DMs from public, but I have a DM.

**Tracy Allaway** (2:16)
You've got the receipts.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (2:17)
I have the receipts. August 2nd, 2016, and I DMed a colleague, I said, Did you leave Bloomberg? He says, Yes, I'll be announcing publicly in a bit. Take a couple of months to study AI properly, then leaving journalism to do something else still connected to AI.
Being our Google reporter was a great gig.

**Tracy Allaway** (2:32)
Something still connected to AI is an understatement.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (2:34)
In the final August 2nd, 2016, but AI is more important than anything else, so I felt best to sort of optimize for that above all else. And then I just said, Well, good luck.

**Tracy Allaway** (2:43)
This is someone who truly learned from their sources, unlike us who remain in the podcasting industry.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (2:49)
So anyway, that person who would that DM was a former Bloomberg reporter, Jack Clark, who's one of our guests today. He is the head of public benefit and co-founder of Anthropic 10 years later, and also Peter McCrory, head of economics at Anthropic. The two perfect guests to talk about all the things in AI these days. So Peter and Jack, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

**Jack Clark** (3:10)
Great to be back. I'm glad I optimized my life to study AI.

**Joe Wiesenthal** (3:14)
One of the calls of the century. So why don't I actually start with that? It's easy to say in 2026 that AI will be a big deal.
You called your shot, you got it right. 2016, what did you see in August 2016 or presumably before? You know what? This is the biggest story of our lives.

**Jack Clark** (3:32)
For two years, when I was reporting at Bloomberg, I wasted a lot of Mr. Bloomberg's printer ink by printing out archive papers about AI research. What I started to do, a very Bloombergian thing, is I started to make graphs charting AI progress over time, measurements of things like computer vision, measurements of things like the skill with which AI agents were able to compete and play Atari games. What I saw in these graphs was the beginning of an exponential and it was everywhere. Like if you looked at vision or sound or video or game playing, you saw the same trend and it became obvious to me that this was a general purpose technology if it was right at the start. My one bone that I have to pick with Bloomberg, which I'm going to use my privilege to mention on air, I never got us to write a story saying, NVIDIA was being used in every single AI research paper. I pitched it and I failed to get it across the line before I left.