Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential”

So we talked three years ago. I'm curious in your view, what has been the biggest update of the last three years? What has been the biggest difference between what it felt like last three years versus now? >> Yeah, I would say actually the underlying technology like the exponential of the technology has has gone broadly speaking I would say about about as I expected it to go.

I mean there's like plus or minus you know a couple there's plus or minus a year or two here. There's plus or minus a year or two there. I don't know that I would have predicted the specific direction of code. Um but but actually when I look at the exponential it it is roughly what I expected in terms of the march of the models from like you know smart high school student to smart college student to like you know beginning to do PhD and professional stuff and in the case of code reaching beyond that.

So you know the frontier is a little bit uneven. It's roughly what I expected. I will tell you though what the most surprising thing has been. The most surprising thing has been the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential.

To me, it is absolutely wild that, you know, you have people, you know, within the bubble and outside the bubble, you know, but but you have people talking about these these, you know, just the same tired old hot button political issues and like, you know, around us. We're like near the end of the exponential. I I want to understand what that exponential looks like right now because the first question I asked you when we recorded three years ago was, you know, what's up with scaling? How why does it work?

Um I have a similar question now but I feel like it's a more complicated question because at least from the public's point of view. >> Yes. >> Three years ago there were these you know well-known public trends where across many orders of magnitude of compute you could see how the loss improves and now we have RL scaling and there's no publicly known scaling law for it. It's not even clear what exactly the story is of is this supposed to be teaching the model skills is ...