The AI Tsunami is Here & Society Isn't Ready | Dario Amodei x Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF

[upbeat music] So I started playing with Claude. It's getting to that point where sometimes it surprises me by how much it knows me. I don't know if that makes sense.

It is surprising to me that we are, in my view, so close to these models reaching the level of human intelligence, and yet there doesn't seem to be a wider recognition in society of what's about to happen. It's as if this tsunami is coming at us, and, you know, it's so close, we can see it on the horizon, and yet people are coming up with these explanations for, "Oh, it's not actually a tsunami. It's just a trick of the light." Like, there hasn't been a public awareness of the risk.

[upbeat music] What is India's role in all this?

Many other companies come here as themselves, a consumer company, and they see, they see India as, as a market, right? A place to obtain consumers. We actually see things a little bit differently.

[upbeat music] What did you do before founding Anthropic?

Yeah. So I was, I was actually originally a biologist. Um, I, uh, you know, did my undergrad in physics, my, uh, PhD in biophysics, and, you know, I wanted to understand biological systems so that I could cure disease. Uh, and, uh, the, the, you know, the thing I noticed about studying biology was its incredible complexity. That, uh, you know, you know, for example, if you look at the, the protein mass spec work that I did, right? Trying to find protein biomarkers, it's, it's just really incredible how much complexity there is, right? You have a given protein, it's like, you know, the RNA gets spliced in a whole bunch of different ways, depending on where it is in the cell. Then it gets post-translationally modified, phosphorylated, complexed with a whole bunch of other proteins. And, and I was starting to despair that it was too complicated for humans to understand. And then as, as I was doing this work on biology, I noticed a lot of the early work around AlexNet, which is one of the first neural nets, like, you know, almost fifteen years ago now. Uh, and, and I said, "Wow, like, you know, AI is actually starting to work. It has some things in common with how the human brain works, but, you know, has the potential to be, be larger and scale better and learn tasks like biology. Maybe this is ultimately gonna be the solution to, uh, you know, to, to solving our problems of, of- solving our problems of biology." So, you know, I, I went to work with Andrew Ng at Baidu, then I was at Google for a year. Then I joined OpenAI a few months after it, uh, started and was, uh, you know, was, was basically led, led, um, all of research there for, for, for, for several years. But then eventually, you know, myself and a few other of the, of the employees just kind of had our own vision for, you know, how, how we wanted to, how we wanted to make AI and what we wanted the company to stand for, and so we went off and founded Anthropic.