Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, writes essays on AI's potential benefits, risks, interpretability, and export controls.
Commenters point to it as the written statement of Anthropic leadership's views and values, and as proof of his role in building GPT-2 and GPT-3.
most issues at every scale of community and time are political, how do you imagine AI will make that better, not worse?
there's no math answer to whether a piece of land in your neighborhood should be apartments, a parking lot or a homeless shelter; whether home prices should go up or down; how much to pay for a new life saving treatment for a child; how much your country should compel fossil fuel emissions even when another country does not... okay, AI isn't going to change anything here, and i've just touched on a bunch of things that can and will affect you personally.
math isn't the right answer to everything, not even most questions. every time someone categorizes "problems" as "hard" and "easy" and talks about "problem solving," they are being co-opted into political apathy. it's cringe for a reason.
there are hardly any mathematicians who get elected, and it's not because voters are stupid! but math is a great way to make money in America, which is why we are talking about it and not because it solves problems.
if you are seeking a simple reason why so many of the "believers" seem to lack integrity, it is because the idea that math is the best solution to everything is an intellectually bankrupt, kind of stupid idea.
if you believe that math is the most dangerous thing because it is the best way to solve problems, you are liable to say something really stupid like this:
> Imagine, say, [a country of] 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any…
Dario defines it as:
'By powerful AI [he dislikes the baggage of AGI, but means the same], I have in mind an AI model—likely similar to today’s LLMs in form, though it might be based on a different architecture, might involve several interacting models, and might be trained differently—with the following properties:
In terms of pure intelligence, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc.
In addition to just being a “smart thing you talk to”, it has all the “interfaces” available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. It can engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet, taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on. It does all of these tasks with, again, a skill exceeding that of the most capable humans in the world.
It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it can be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary.
It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer…
It's hard to be certain what each individual thinks. We can do our best to judge based on what they each say and do. And there are significant differences in what each of these individuals have chosen to say and do over the years. The info available to the public makes it seem a lot like Dario's motivations & priorities differ from those of Sam and others.
This doesn't seem like the right place to spend my time litigating that point to its fullest extent (no-one here is doing that). But there's plenty of relevant info surrounding eg.:
* The New Yorker article on Altman [1]
* The story behind Anthropic's founding
* Various efforts to influence government policy (a16z policies and contributors [2], Trump's inauguration donors [3], giving Trump credit for AI infrastructure [4], Dario's op-eds [5])
1: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted
2: https://a16z.com/portfolio/
3: https://www.opensecrets.org/trump/2025-inauguration-donors
4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe11mJ8mCHU
5: https://darioamodei.com/
> Where is anything saying there should be?
What are the boosters ranting and raving about if not the above? Am I just confused and the end game for all of the AI hype, investment, infrastructure build out, etc. over the last N years is ... hobby projects?
Here's a quote I found after a quick web search for "dario ai benefits":
> The list of positive applications of powerful AI is extremely long (and includes robotics, manufacturing, energy, and much more), but I’m going to focus on a small number of areas that seem to me to have the greatest potential to directly improve the quality of human life. The five categories I am most excited about are:
> Biology and physical health
> Neuroscience and mental health
> Economic development and poverty
> Peace and governance
> Work and meaning
https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
>> Amodei's / Hassabis' comments in particular came off as so arrogant and annoying.
Exactly which part of their writings comes off as arrogant to you? The only point in Amodei's article[0] that could be remotely be interpreted as arrogant is this:
All of this is to say that DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough or something that fundamentally changes the economics of LLM’s; it’s an expected point on an ongoing cost reduction curve. What’s different this time is that the company that was first to demonstrate the expected cost reductions was Chinese. Maybe I'm different, but it really does sound reasonable judgement to me.
[0]: https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls#deepseek-s-models
It feels like every major lab is saying the same thing:
https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace https://www.wsj.com/video/events/the-race-for-true-ai-at-google/7953FE4B-AE84-4AFA-9722-AA215EB357EE
Even folks _leaving_ OpenAI, who have no incentive to drive hype, are saying that we're very close to AGI. https://x.com/sjgadler/status/1883928200029602236
Even folks like Yoshua Benjio, Hinton are saying we're close to it. The models keep getting better at an exponential.
How much evidence does one need to dispel the "this is OpenAI/sama hype" argument?