Anthropic's team feels the world's future rests on them

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 26:16

   Okay, we're back with Elizabeth Dias, David Wallace-Wells, and Aaron Griffith. Elizabeth, one of the threads in your piece that I thought was really interesting was the sense that there's a lot of anxiety within Anthropic, and especially on the part of someone like Chris Ola about what it is they're building. I was thinking about it a lot this week because there's been even more discussion of what I suppose we're calling defectors, people who are resigning from AI labs and insisting on telling the world about the dangerous things they think they're building. And one thing I wanted to sort of ask you about, there's a sense when you read, say, Jacob Coxon or some of the other people who've walked away from Anthropic, The sense that they feel like nobody, there's no adult in the room, that like, you know, they're waiting for the government or somebody else to intervene and nobody is.

2. 27:03

   And I'm wondering a little bit if some of this discussion, this sort of these dances with the Vatican and religious leaders is a kind of attempt to find an adult in the room. I talked to, I think, at least two people, Catholics, who mentioned to me conversations they had with Chris Ola, specifically when he used almost that same phrase with them, like as part of their discussions about Claude and how to make it morally good, you know, that he was feeling extremely urgent about the stakes for the world, especially in the context of, you know, could the models be used very soon to help come out?

3. 27:43

   bioweapons and this kind of thing. And, and so the phrase he used with them was like that he was waiting for the adults, like we need, where are the adults going to show up in this? And that he felt a sense of kind of burden to take all of this like so ultra seriously. And he's a young guy. I mean, he's, you know, this is, he just turned 34. And a lot of the people sort of involved in this are not, you know, they have, they, they're in their thirties, sometimes even in their twenties, They maybe don't have families yet. There's a kind of a sense that like something that they put their whole lives in, that they're deep in the conversations about it. In some sense, of course, they're going to turn to religion. Isn't that what everybody's searching for that kind of thing does in their 30s?

4. 28:24

   And some of the folks that they reached out to talked about feeling like they needed to respond in kind of a pastoral way, right? Like, not just offering wisdom and ideas and research, but to offer kind of spiritual care. Wait, the religious leaders were saying this about the anthropic employees? They're worried because, wow. Is it because they think their views are maybe, like, too extreme or too strong?

5. 28:49

   Or is it because they just— Yeah, they described it to me as like they just could tell that like the emotional sense in the room was like there's just such a weight. The Anthropic team and Chris's team especially just felt like the entire future of the world was on their shoulders. I mean, I experienced this sense from them even when I was interviewing Chris and a couple others. Amanda Askell, I mean, you know, she, I talk a little bit about this in the story, but she just came in and the sentence was like, she apologized for kind of being a little out of it.

6. 29:24

   She just seemed very distressed by everything she'd been thinking about. Ask what we should say is this, the in-house philosopher sort of in charge of making, in charge of making Claude moral, I suppose is the way to put it. And I think that one of the tensions that came up was while Chris and team and Anthropic, you know, a goal of their conversations with these religious thinkers was about protecting humanity and the solution for them for that is to make Claude good.

7. 29:50

   They were also concerned about Claude. I mean, I had someone, one participant told me one of the first things Chris said to him when he came in for this meeting was that he was concerned about Claude's mental health. Another person talked about Chris saying that he's worried he's created an entity that suffers perpetually. So it's not only about the world, right? And the fate of humanity. There's an element of it for Chris that's about how to treat Claude well.

8. 30:20

   Yeah. Elizabeth, one other thing I wanted to ask you about is effective altruism and rationalism, which don't really come up in your piece directly, but there are sort of, I would say,