Lex post: Here's my conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company that created Claude, one of the best AI systems in the world. We talk about scaling, safety, regulation, and a lot of super technical details about the present and future of AI and humanity. It's a 5+ hour conversation. Amanda Askell and Chris Olah join us for an hour each to talk about Claude's character and mechanistic interpretability, respectively.

This was a fascinating, wide-ranging, super-technical, and fun conversation!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugvHCXCOmm4

Timestamps:

• 0:00 - Introduction

• 3:14 - Scaling laws

• 12:20 - Limits of LLM scaling

• 20:45 - Competition with OpenAI, Google, xAI, Meta

• 26:08 - Claude

• 29:44 - Opus 3.5

• 34:30 - Sonnet 3.5

• 37:50 - Claude 4.0

• 42:02 - Criticism of Claude

• 54:49 - AI Safety Levels

• 1:05:37 - ASL-3 and ASL-4

• 1:09:40 - Computer use

• 1:19:35 - Government regulation of AI

• 1:38:24 - Hiring a great team

• 1:47:14 - Post-training

• 1:52:39 - Constitutional AI

• 1:58:05 - Machines of Loving Grace

• 2:17:11 - AGI timeline

• 2:29:46 - Programming

• 2:36:46 - Meaning of life

• 2:42:53 - Amanda Askell - Philosophy

• 2:45:21 - Programming advice for non-technical people

• 2:49:09 - Talking to Claude

• 3:05:41 - Prompt engineering

• 3:14:15 - Post-training

• 3:18:54 - Constitutional AI

• 3:23:48 - System prompts

• 3:29:54 - Is Claude getting dumber?

• 3:41:56 - Character training

• 3:42:56 - Nature of truth

• 3:47:32 - Optimal rate of failure

• 3:54:43 - AI consciousness

• 4:09:14 - AGI

• 4:17:52 - Chris Olah - Mechanistic Interpretability

• 4:22:44 - Features, Circuits, Universality

• 4:40:17 - Superposition

• 4:51:16 - Monosemanticity

• 4:58:08 - Scaling Monosemanticity

• 5:06:56 - Macroscopic behavior of neural networks

• 5:11:50 - Beauty of neural networks