In an insightful discussion at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco, Dario Amodei, Co-Founder and CEO of Anthropic, and Daniela Amodei, Co-Founder and President of Anthropic, discussed their unique approach to developing artificial intelligence (AI) that is not only innovative but also safe and responsible.

Dario and Daniela, for sure, possess the energy and vision characteristic of successful entrepreneurs.

At the core of Anthropic’s mission lies a dual thesis, as Dario explained: “We had two real theses, and one of those theses is something that I think is shared among, you know, three or four or five companies that have been very successful in this space. And one was very unique to Anthropic.”

The first thesis aligns with the industry’s scaling hypothesis, which suggests that increasing the size of language models through more data and computing power leads to better performance across a wide range of tasks.

However, Anthropic’s unique approach revolves around the second thesis: “The second was that along with scaling these models up, making them like a very powerful rocket ship, you need to steer the rocket ship.” This commitment to steering the powerful AI models they develop has driven Anthropic’s efforts in areas like constitutional AI, interpretability and AI security, ensuring their models remain aligned with human values and resistant to potential misuse or harm.

Daniela stressed the significance of this responsible approach.

“Something that has always been this founding principle for us is, you know, we see an incredible amount of potential benefit from this technology, right?” she said. “Something that Dario and I talk about a lot, together with the company, with our co-founders, is this technology to transform sectors like health care, right.”

However, she also acknowledged the lessons learned from previous technological waves, adding: “We’ve just had several decades now to kind of look back on things like social media and say, wow, you know, there was a lot of good that came out of this, but there were also a lot of harm that were kind of caused by this technology.”

Dario echoed this sentiment.

“We really try to be the most responsible actors that we can be and think about what are the potential externalities that could be caused kind of accidentally by this tech. And we really try and take a very broad approach to how we think about that,” he said.

In discussing the pressing concerns posed by AI, Dario adopts a balanced approach. He expressed that one should simultaneously feel excitement and concern. He revealed that when asked on a scale of one to ten how excited or worried he was about AI, he responded that he was ten out of ten on both counts. He emphasized the importance of addressing both emotions equally.

However, he remained optimistic about the potential benefits, particularly in the biomedical field.

“I really look at diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s,” he said. “We’re getting to this range of diseases that that are super biologically complicated and that humans are running up against their limits of what they can understand, right. What can fit in one person’s understanding.”

As Anthropic continues to push the boundaries of AI innovation, their commitment to responsible development and steering the powerful technology they create remains unwavering. By addressing both the excitement and concerns surrounding AI’s rapid progress, Dario and Daniela Amodei exemplify a balanced and principled approach to harnessing the transformative potential of this technology while mitigating its risks.

Featured image: Credit: Bloomberg