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Policy on the AI Exponential

darioamodei.com

221–230 of 280 posts

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did your AI-assisted workflow look like 1 year ago? I can only speak for myself, but I would carefully specify a class or module in great detail and then hand it off to the model to implement, then carefully review the result. How about 2 years ago? Back then, I wouldn't even trust it to write a 5-line function without making some sort of silly mistake. Today, I can leave an agent running by itself for 20 or 30…

I disagree with your assessment pretty strongly -- the models themselves hit a wall over a year ago once companies exhausted all existing training data. LLMs don't induce world models, and they aren't capable of real search an planning outside their training distributions. They, structurally, never will be. I haven't noticed a change in what I trust a model to generate in response to a single prompt in a year. The fa…

If you think they've been at the same level for the past year, your skill is at issue. There was a huge jump in Nov/Dec with Opus 4.5+ and GPT 5.x series, and they've been incrementally stronger over the past 6 months.

As a next step, take another look at the next practices, and apply them to your work (simon's agentic series is a good place to start). Or not, you do you.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#222
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, your link is not very convincing. But what’s interesting is that you are commenting on a post where Dario is suggesting that LLMs are so extremely powerful that they can take over, help synthesise bioweapons, help in warfare, help in drug discovery — the whole post here is to try and regulate this. If you believe AI can’t even create positive value let alone discover new things then your problem is some…

> So it is absolutely strange and contrasting to see you believe that LLMs are so weak as to create negative value while the CEO is asking about regulations because AI is too powerful. You wouldn't ask a chemistry professor to write code. So just because LLMs create negative value for software development doesn't mean that they can't be helpful for bioweapons synthesis, especially considering the range of chemistry a…

This is a ridiculous stance to take. That LLMs are simultaneously negative value but can also help synthesise bioweapons. It’s the sort of stance you take when you already feel ideologically against AI. I don’t think it’s coherent.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did your AI-assisted workflow look like 1 year ago? I can only speak for myself, but I would carefully specify a class or module in great detail and then hand it off to the model to implement, then carefully review the result. How about 2 years ago? Back then, I wouldn't even trust it to write a 5-line function without making some sort of silly mistake. Today, I can leave an agent running by itself for 20 or 30…

https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthro... I feel like the problem is there aren’t any great metrics. Boris Cherny probably gets paid like $2 mil per year. So what does it mean that Claude writes 100% of his code? And Claude writes 100% of code for most teams? Has Anthropic started laying people off? If Claude is writing 100% of code doesn’t that mean game over? It’s both amazing and kind of a us…

What does "writes X% of code" even mean?

I use AI to generate code very rarely (basically replacing searching code from SO which was also rare) yet maybe 90-95% of my code is machine generated (macros, snippet engines, boilerplate generators, IDE/LSP features etc) if we define as how many characters in the source code out of all characters did I write by my hand.

Before collective AI psychosis nobody cared how much code is hand written and how much machine generated and the difference was absolutely massive between developers. There was also no guaranteed correlation between "productivity" and how much developer hand writes or actually uses their tools well and the same applies with AI usage.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that AI poses a threat to society. I act on this by not developing world-leading AI models and offering them to anyone willing to pay top dollar, while funneling that money back into accelerating AI capabilities development. Maybe Dario would consider taking a similar ethical position? Maybe he would support restrictions and taxes on data center construction, in order to slow down the pace?

If Anthropic were not developing these models, one of many other companies would be. I think it's good that the CEO of the current world-leader is at least considering these discussions and platforming possible solutions. The fact that he doesn't support more restrictive approaches that don't align with his incentives doesn't invalidate the points he is making.

> If Anthropic were not developing these models, one of many other companies would be.

"Everyone else is doing it" but even worse as nobody else is actually even doing it and you just made up that part.

Just commenting on this horrible justification trick in general.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#225

Its hard to read the first half of this as anything other than regulatory capture propaganda. It really all ties together as: > AI has become a major commercial technology >Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety > AI companies that deve…

It’s just not insane to imagine that ONCE AGAIN the people making the technology might not have any fucking clue what will come of it

Seriously does anyone besides Jules Verne have a decent track record of predicting “The Future”?

lol oh color me shocked, another ape is loudly declaring “this is the way the world will be”

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#226

Its hard to read the first half of this as anything other than regulatory capture propaganda. It really all ties together as: > AI has become a major commercial technology >Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety > AI companies that deve…

It’s just not insane to imagine that ONCE AGAIN the people making the technology might not have any fucking clue what will come of it Seriously does anyone besides Jules Verne have a decent track record of predicting “The Future”? lol oh color me shocked, another ape is loudly declaring “this is the way the world will be”

Sci-fi writers have a great track record of predicting the future.

Scientists and engineers have an abysmal track record of predicting the future.

You know to be concerned when a claim is dismissed with ‘that’s just science fiction, it will never happen’

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is an identity. It's social proof that you have value, that you can do something for someone else.

I was funemployed for a 9 month stretch last year (layoff severance package, followed by waiting for a visa and traveling), and when I wasn't traveling, I found my life kind of falling apart with a lack of structure. I tried to schedule workout classes and hobbies, as well as involvement in my church, but it just didn't fill my time, and none of my friends were free during the day. I spent a lot of time with my retir…

It is simply because you have spent all your life being told what to do with your working hours, that you cannot self-direct and find a productive use for your time other than lazying around.

The fact that you call it ‘funemployment’ is proof of this, which is perfectly fine if the goal is relaxing between jobs. Plenty of people that work for themselves have no such notion.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#228

I know this is likely just for IPO hype but when I read things like this I sometimes wonder if I must be missing something. I use agents everyday and find them really useful and they save me a lot of headache. At the same time I find that if I let it self-direct at a high level at all it generally makes bad choices that cause me headaches later so I can’t really give them autonomy. Enough people seem to believe this…

Given that according to some we can code at 10x speed for at least half a year, I wonder where there are some autocoded softwares with 5 years' worth of equivalent human engineering work.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#229
> Ban the domestic use of fully autonomous weapons.

"Domestic" is an interesting shift here from the earlier _general_ discussions on autonomous weapons. So robot imperialism is good for Dario. But the imperial boomerang is a thing, in which case the proposed regulation itself is smoke and mirrors or just regulatory capture?

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#230
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just not insane to imagine that ONCE AGAIN the people making the technology might not have any fucking clue what will come of it Seriously does anyone besides Jules Verne have a decent track record of predicting “The Future”? lol oh color me shocked, another ape is loudly declaring “this is the way the world will be”

Sci-fi writers have a great track record of predicting the future. Scientists and engineers have an abysmal track record of predicting the future. You know to be concerned when a claim is dismissed with ‘that’s just science fiction, it will never happen’

> Sci-fi writers have a great track record of predicting the future.

Broken clock... They are good at exploring possibilities, but none of the famous one predicted today.

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