The Ledger, every show

“My fundamental view is that AI has been on an exponential for the last 10 years and as part of a sort of Moore's law for intelligence, and that we are now well advanced on that curve, and there are only a small number of years for AI models surpassing the cogn…”

“I actually think that, you know, as the revenues, as the economic business of AI ramps up and it's ramping up exponentially, you know, if I'm right in a couple years, it'll be the biggest source of revenue in the world, right? It'll be the biggest industry in …”

“I was for a variety of reasons just not convinced that at the, you know, institution that, that I was at, that, that there was a real and serious conviction to do it in the right way.”

“Whereas the model is able to kind of, Think for itself and come up with an answer on its own. So it's something you know, it's something totally new. It's just, it's not just matching some of the text that exists on the internet.”

“We are, you know, in, in, in my view, so close to these models reaching the level of human intelligence And yet, there doesn't seem to be a wider recognition in society of what's about to happen.”

“So back in 2022 you know, we had an early version of Claude, Claude one. This was before ChatGPT. And we chose not to release this because we were worried that it would kick off an arms race and not give us enough time to, you know, to build these systems safe…”

“I do think when our AI system, when our AI systems get advanced enough, I suspect they'll have something that, you know, resembles what we would call consciousness or moral significance. I do think it'll happen at some point.”

“A lot of these models, particularly the ones that come from China, are optimized for benchmarks and are distilled from, ah, you know, from kind of the big US labs.”

“So I think these terms are totally meaningless. I don't know what AGI is. I don't know what super intelligence is. It sounds like a marketing term.”

“So we see the progress as being very fast, and the exponential is continuing, and we don't see any diminishing returns.”

“I am pretty bearish on what they're trying to do.”

“Anthropic is actually the fastest growing software company in history at the scale that it's at. So we grew from zero to a hundred million in 2023, a hundred million to a billion in 2024, and this year we've grown from one billion to, I think I said this befor…”

“I've actually always seen it as a red herring. When I see it, when I see a new model come out, I don't care whether it's open source or not. Like if we talk about Deep Seek, I don't think it mattered that Deep Seek is open source. I think I ask, is it a good m…”

“Some of these people who on Twitter, you know, cheer for acceleration, I don't think they have a humanistic sense of the benefit of the technology. Their brains just full of adrenaline, and they're like, they want to cheer for something, they want to accelerat…”

“You know, I think my reason to start a company was that I had worked at other companies and I just didn't feel like the way those companies were run was really oriented towards, you know, trying, trying, trying to have that impact. There was a story around it …”

“No matter how much you're driving the forward, the company technically, if you're working for someone whose motivations are not sincere, who's not an honest person, who does not truly want to make the world better, it's not going to work. You're just contribut…”

“I've said nothing that, that any, that anywhere near resembles the idea that this company should be the only one to build the technology. I don't know how anyone could ever derive that from anything that I've said. It's just, yeah, yeah, it's just a, it's just…”

“I think that next year we're probably going to see from multiple players models on the order of one billion dollars, and in 2025 we're going to see models on the order of Several billion, I don't know, perhaps even ten billion dollars.”

“If this is like, you have to fill out a thousand pages of paperwork and get 15 different licenses from different bodies to, you know, to make an AI system, that's never gonna work, that's gonna slow things down, you know, other adversaries You know, authoritar…”

“If you scale up models, you give them more data, more compute. Again, there are a few modifications like RL, but not really very much. It's pretty close to pure scaling. You find that, you know, when you do that, you find, you know, incredible increases in per…”

“And so the scaling laws just tell you that, like, the, you know, if you put in the ingredients to the chemical reaction, the ingredients of data and model size, that what you get out is, is intelligence. Intelligence is the product of the chemical reaction.”

“I've said openly, publicly, not for the first time that I'm at least somewhat uncomfortable with the amount of concentration of power that's happening here. I would say almost overnight, almost by accident.”

“This is one reason we just, you know, don't like the idea of, you know, using ads, right? You know, this is because you're not paying for the product like you're the product. And, you know, in this case, the, you know, the product then would be all, you know, …”

“We've given the model the ability to basically terminate its conversations by saying, I don't want to be involved in the conversation. And, you know, models do that when, you know, they have to deal with, you know, particularly violent or brutal content.”

“We're not going to promise never to build first party products, right? That we should be honest about. For example, a bunch of people at Anthropic write code. And so, you know, we made this internal tool called Claude Code.”

“I think coding is going away first, or coding is being, you know, done by the AI models first, and then the broader task of software engineering will take longer, but I think that is, you know, that doing that end to end, I think that is going to happen as wel…”

“Within a range, price doesn't matter that much if a model is, is the best model, the most cognitively capable model. Price doesn't matter much. The form in which it's presented doesn't matter much. So I'm focused almost entirely just on having the smartest mod…”

“Static data is becoming less important and what we might call like dynamic data that the model creates itself is, you know, for reinforcement learning is becoming more important. So, you know, I don't think data is, is, is quite the most central thing anymore,…”

“If there's like three firms, if there's three firms in the economy, all are kind of independently behaving, behaving rationally, it doesn't equilibrate to zero.”

“Yeah, so the, again, the gross margins right now are very positive.”

“Each model makes money, but the company loses money.”

“The point is it doesn't equilibrate to perfect competition with zero margins. If there's like three firms, if there's three firms in the economy, All are kind of independently behaving, behaving rationally. It doesn't equilibrate to zero.”

“Each model makes money, but the company loses money.”

“When we go out, when we're you know, competing against other companies for enterprise contracts, We see, just honestly and candidly, we see Google, and we see OpenAI. Every once in a while, we see a couple other US players. I have almost never lost a deal, los…”

“I feel in fact that I and Anthropic have often been able to do a better job of articulating the benefits of AI than some of the people who call themselves optimists or accelerationists.”

“You know, I think there's maybe I don't know, 20 or 25% chance that sometime in the next two years, the models just start getting, stop getting better for reasons we don't understand, or maybe reasons we do understand, like, you know, data or compute availabil…”

“And from a, from an, from a machine learning perspective, from an AI perspective, there's no reason we can't make the context length a hundred million words today, right? Which is roughly what a human hears in their lifetime.”

“Without being too specific you know, I think, and we already have maybe some, you know, some evidence to suggest that this is another of those problems that is, is not as difficult as it seems. That will fall to scale Plus a slightly different way of thinking …”

“The way things work at Anthropic is there's a series of levels. When candidate comes in, they get assigned a level, and we don't negotiate that level.”

“Our view is that if anything, the enterprise use of AI is going to be greater even than the consumer use of AI, right?”

“There's the cost of running, there's the cost of running the model, right? So, so for every dollar the model makes, it costs a certain amount. That is actually already fairly profitable.”

“At, you know, at any time, if the models stopped getting better, or if a company stopped investing in the next model you know, you would, you know, you would have probably a viable business with the existing models, but everyone is investing in the next model.”

“I don't think open source works the same way in, in AI that it has worked in other areas. Primarily because with open source, you can see the, you know, you can see the source code of the model. Here, we can't see inside the model. You know, it's often called …”

“Actually, the original reason for building GPT-II and GPT-III, it was an outgrowth of the kind of AI alignment work that we were doing, right? Where myself and Paul Cristiano and some of the Anthropic co-founders had invented this technique called RL from huma…”

“I think in this field, the alignment of AI systems and the capability of AI systems is intertwined in this way that always ends up being kind of more tied and more intertwined than we think. Actually what this made me realize is that It's very hard to work on …”

“I think we are on track, even if there were no algorithmic improvements from here, even if we just scaled up what we had so far, ah, I think the scaling laws are going to continue, and I think that's going to lead to amazing improvements.”

“Our view was that, look, this is the beginning of something amazing because there's no limit and you can continue to scale it up. And there's no reason why the patterns we've seen before won't continue to hold. The objective of predicting the next word is so r…”

“I think my basic view is that inference will not get that much more expensive. The simple, you know, the basic logic of the scaling laws is that if you increase compute by a factor of n, you need to increase data by a factor of square root of n. And size the m…”