Former head of safety at OpenAI and now CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, discusses the challenges of building trustworthy AI models and the importance of safety in AI systems. They explore the potential of AI in domains like healthcare, climate change, and poverty elimination, emphasizing the need for citizen and government involvement.
Building safe AI requires technical measures to regulate AI models and societal institutions to keep up with changing technology.
AI systems need to consistently exhibit helpful, honest, and harmless qualities, while acknowledging their limitations and providing reliable answers.
Deep dives
Building AI Systems: Excitement and Concerns
The podcast episode explores the excitement and concerns surrounding the rapid advancement of AI technology. The guest, Dario Amade, founder and CEO of Anthropic, discusses the exponential growth of AI systems and the challenges it presents. While the technology offers endless possibilities and positive applications, there is also a long list of concerns to address. The accelerating pace of AI development outpaces our ability to adapt and control it. The need for technical measures to steer and regulate AI models, as well as societal institutions to keep up with the changing technology, is highlighted.
Building Safe and Trustworthy AI Systems
The conversation delves into the importance of building AI systems that are helpful, honest, and harmless. Dario emphasizes the need for AI models to consistently exhibit these qualities to be beneficial to society. The discussion revolves around Anthropic's focus on developing AI systems, like their large language models, that can be friendly, creative, professional, and unbiased. The challenge of addressing the 'hallucination problem,' where models sometimes make credible yet incorrect statements, is acknowledged. The goal is to ensure AI systems can acknowledge their limitations and provide reliable and verifiable answers.
Understanding AI Models and Planning for Regulation
The podcast sheds light on the underlying structures of large language models and the challenges of understanding their behaviors. Dario explains the two-stage training process that these models undergo and the need to examine what the models are truly capable of in order to detect potential issues. The conversation also raises questions regarding the regulation and governance of AI systems. Dario emphasizes the importance of societal consensus in setting the rules and extends the analogy of AI systems to technologies such as cars and airplanes, highlighting the need for rules of the road to ensure safety and usefulness.