探访Anthropic：9650亿美元AI巨头的内部故事

I love this library. It is, it is, it is absolutely beautiful library. Are you a big reader? You know, I mean, I, I, I read a lot in general. I don't know that I've had that much time in over the last year or so. Dario Amodei is an unlikely AI celebrity. He's known for warning the world about the risks of artificial intelligence. Now, his company is an AI frontrunner valued at nearly a trillion dollars. You're shipping so much, so fast.

How are you doing that? We use Claude, you know, across the product development cycle, and it allows us to release very fast. Founded by a team of OpenAI defectors in 2021, Anthropic started out as an underdog lab. Today it's the breakout star, wiping billions in value off software stocks, going head-to-head with the Pentagon, and creating models allegedly powerful enough to burst through the walls of modern cybersecurity.

Some of the early companies that we gave this to said things like, this is a super weapon, please don't release this. Guiding Anthropic through this is a sibling duo, Dario, the brother and visionary, and Daniela, the sister and operator who puts Dario's swirling cosmic thoughts into action. Dario and I, we've always been really close since we were little, but I think we always really wanted to do something big together.

Okay, but when you argue who wins? No one, No one. As the AI arms race escalates, the Amodeis are eager to establish themselves as the good guys. But Anthropic's technology could have profound implications for how humanity works, learns thinks, even fights wars. Anthropic is run by an ideological lunatic. This is a debate about what the proper use of AI by the government is. At some point, the models become very dangerous, you know, the bad guys will have it too.

And at that point, we have to make sure that good guys have an even better model. The name Anthropic actually comes from the Greek word for human, which speaks to their mission to build responsible AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. Can you actually do that when you're building the most powerful technology in the world? You are at the center of the AI universe right now. What does that feel like? 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. So, you know, I was watching this graph for a while and I said, oh yeah, we'll probably become the, you know, the, the AI company with, you know, the, the most revenue and the most valuation some sometime around this time. And, and indeed, indeed, it has happened. We're just keeping in mind all the things we usually keep in mind, you know, how do we train good models?

How do we put them in good products? How do we make sure that everything's safe? What were you like as a kid growing up in San Francisco? I know your, your dad was a leather craftsman. Your mom worked in libraries. How did that shape you? You know, the whole, you know, like first, you know, internet revolution was happening around me and I had absolutely no interest in it. I was just interested in like, doing math and like scra, you know, scrawling things.

I was interested in, like, you know, understanding the universe. I was interested in science fiction. I think I just felt a lot of curiosity about the world. What was it like growing up with Dario? He was so smart. He was taking, you know, calculus when he was, you know, in I think like middle school. He took math classes at UC Berkeley, when he was in high school. I was actually more into to reading and arts. So we were almost like complete compliments in that way.

Dario studied neuroscience before turning to AI at Baidu and later Google. While Daniela started out as an early employee at Stripe. They lived together in San Francisco, along with Daniela's husband, Holden Karnofsky. Then in 2016, Dario joined the newly formed OpenAI followed by Daniela. In 2018, the company began as a nonprofit that promised a safe, more open path to super intelligence. I think we need to think right now about how we want this deployed, how everyone gets to benefit from it, how we're gonna govern it, how we're gonna make it safe and sort of good for humanity.

At OpenAI, Dario developed the concept of scaling laws, predicting that large language models would improve simply by adding more data and computing power, even if the underlying algorithm stayed the same At that point in time, I know it sounds crazy now, looking back, not a lot of people believed, Hey, scale up is the way that these models are gonna get smarter and better. That was sort of an unusual counter-cultural scientific perspective that I think was really held by our, you know, founding research team.

That approach helped supercharge OpenAI's models, paving the way for chatGPT, but the Amodeis reportedly clashed with Altman over the company's direction and values. Altman has said, for all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company. Your decision to leave OpenAI has become Silicon Valley lore. What did you disagree on? Look, I'll, I'm gonna say it, I'm gonna say it very simply. There are many valid disagreements to be had on safety.

We certainly had some of those disagreements with them, but you know, people that, that, that, that alone is not sufficient to leave. When you feel that you can't trust someone, when you feel that their values are not what they say they are, when you feel that they're not honest, that makes it very hard to, you know, to continue to work with a company, to continue to trust the company. And look, at the end of the day, why argue with someone when you don't have the same vision and you don't trust them?

The way to resolve it is you go off and do your thing. They go off and do their thing. So this is Precita Park. When Dario and Daniela decided to leave OpenAI to start Anthropic, this is where the early team would get together. It was during the pandemic. So the story goes, and a bunch of early employees would come here, they'd pull up a chair on the grass, they'd have lunch, and they'd talk about what they were building.

When we started this company, there were seven co-founders of which me and Daniela are two. And now, you know, we we're, we're the, we're the basically the only company in the space that has all of its co-founders still here. You don't get to, you know, be a company of the size and scale that we are. With that happening like that almost never happens. From the start, Anthropic pitched itself as the ultimate safety conscious AI company.

Dario has published long essays with names like Machines of Loving Grace and The Adolescence of Technology, musing on the miraculous potential of AI, as well as the worst case scenarios. Anthropic's chatbot, Claude has been trained to follow a set of principles called a constitution, intended to keep it on the straight and narrow. Claude has a very distinct style and feel a human name. What are you trying to convey? I think when people interact with Claude versus, you know, other systems, there is more of a feeling of, I like to describe it as professional warmth.

So the goal is not for it to be your best friend, but it's not for it to be sort of cold, rote, calculating. It should feel approachable, but distant, right? Professional. Anthropic has talked about teaching Claude to be good. What is a good model? What is a bad model? You don't want a model that lies accidentally or intentionally, right? Lying, we call hallucinations. It makes something up. The models are just trained to predict the next word.

So sometimes they don't know and they just invent something. Models sometimes, as we've shown in our research, can purposely try to deceive you. We have to make sure that doesn't happen in production models that we expose to customers. And then there's a lot of wor

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