Top 15 Dario Amodei Quotes

The figure I most identified with was Leo Szilard, who was the one who first had the idea that there could be a chain reaction. My view is we're not going to get through this with larger-than-life personalities, or figures who try to be at the center of everything. In some ways I actually see Oppenheimer as a failure case — as what should not happen. There are a lot of powerful actors who have interests here, and the only way it's going to end well for everyone is if there are checks and balances everywhere.

My message is definitely not "doom is coming." My message is: this is something we should see coming, that we're worried about, and that we need to actually respond to positively.

The idea that this is cheap marketing is itself cheap marketing. It's part of the disease of Silicon Valley — it's been caught up in this social media world of three seconds.

You automate 90% of the job — great, people are ten times more productive in the other 10%, because they're ten times more leveraged. But eventually it gets close to a hundred percent.

We could have this very unusual combination of very fast GDP growth and high unemployment — or at least underemployment, a lot of low-wage jobs, high inequality.

I would guess that the software industry gets not smaller, although there will be some big losers — those who don't see what's coming, who don't identify the moats they have.

If you pick a business model that fundamentally conflicts with your values, you're going to have a hard time. Either you betray your own values, or you become irrelevant.

When we started this company, there were seven co-founders, of which me and Daniela are two. And now we're basically the only company in the space that has all of its co-founders still here. That almost never happens.

There are many valid disagreements to be had on safety. We certainly had some of those disagreements with them, but that alone is not sufficient to leave. When you feel that you can't trust someone, when you feel that their values are not what they say they are, when you feel that they're not honest — that makes it very hard to continue to work with a company, to continue to trust the company. At the end of the day, why argue with someone when you don't have the same vision and you don't trust them? The way to resolve it is: you go off and do your thing, they go off and do their thing.

I know it sounds crazy now, looking back — not a lot of people believed that scaling up is the way these models are going to get smarter and better. That was an unusual, counter-cultural scientific perspective that I think was really held by our founding research team.

The first internet revolution was happening around me and I had absolutely no interest in it. I was just interested in doing math and scrawling things. I was interested in understanding the universe. I was interested in science fiction. I think I just felt a lot of curiosity about the world.

The experience I've had for my whole career, and certainly the whole time at Anthropic, is that there's this kind of smooth exponential. And the experience of the smooth exponential is: nothing's happening, nothing's happening, nothing's happening — little things happen, and then zoom, it goes crazy.

Just operate always with a sense of dignity and principle. When you look back, you shouldn't be ashamed of what you did. You were putting every iota of effort you could into trying to get it right.

Something really big is happening to humanity here. While the technology is being built by a small number of people, we need to make it work for everyone and we need to make sure that between all of us we make the right decisions.

Something is happening to humanity with this technology, bigger than anything that maybe has happened in hundreds of years. And so we need to find some way for everyone to be an active participant in what is happening.