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 thing… - Dario Amodei

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.

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.

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.