Anthropic CEO: I Hope Murray is Wrong too (but sadly, I don’t think so)
Claude’s co-creator Dario Amodei, explaining just how bad things are about to get.
As I’ve written about many times before, Anthropic is my favourite AI company by a country mile… And this recent clip is just another reason why.
As veteran journalist Anderson Cooper suggests with wide-eyed surprise, being open about the seriously negative effects of his product is definitely not in this CEO’s best interests.
But this is why it’s so impressive to learn about Anthropic’s unique corporate structure.
Despite recently minting all 7 of Anthropic’s founders (each a former employee of OpenAI, including Dario’s sister Daniela) as legit billionaires, the company chose to incorporate as an Delaware public-benefit corporation, enabling its directors to ‘balance the financial interests of stockholders with its public benefit purpose’.
The company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust is a purpose trust for "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity", allowing the PBC to elect directors onto Anthropic's board.
So what, you ask?
Put simply, when your ‘seed’ funding comes from convicted crypto problem child Sam Bankman-Fried and your investors include Amazon ($8B) and Google ($2B), it’s safe to assume that - left unchecked - your technology can and will be used to extract as much value for the least number of people as possible.
However, when the founders’ very own public-benefit corporation has the ability to choose who oversees the ongoing operations (including hiring and firing Anthropic’s CEO), it sends a very clear message to everyone involved:
“Yes, we discovered a giant uranium deposit directly under our property. This is awesome and we’re not anti-capitalism! But we believe something this valuable and dangerous must be shared with those who stand to lose the most from its use, not just those who will inevitably gain from it regardless”.
Who cares what these nerd socialists think!!
Free markets!
Let the people decide!
etc
Yeah… Nah.
Because if you pay attention to not just what Dario says in this interview - but more importantly - what he doesn’t quite say (yet)… It’s not difficult to construct a fairly robust vision of our collective future, just 12-18 months from now.
Or, if you can’t be bothered reading between the lines of some tech CEO you’ve never heard of, fair enough.
Instead, watch this video featuring one of the most famous tech CEO’s in history.
Then just take a second to genuinely ask yourself:
Why?
How?
What could possibly make Sam Altman so confident of something so mind bogglingly ambitious?
“If we knew how to get a trillion dollars right now, would we be able to deploy that profitably in the next few years? I’m not sure…
But I feel confident we can make $500B of value back”
Or, put another way… How do organisations like Softbank and Oracle usually drive $500B of value?
Hint: It’s not by investing in the health of their staff, cleaning up the oceans or supporting the arts.
