00:08:48 · Max Read, Erin Griffith
[00:08:48] S1: So they're looking for new avenues for growth potentially. They're they're trying to sell different stories about what the next big product is. [00:08:56] S3: Yeah. And I think we're gonna see this on the show. I'll be watching that pretty closely. I think that's gonna kick off in probably a week or so. [00:09:01] S1: Before you start, what is a road show? [00:09:03] S3: So in a week or so, Anthropic is going to basically go on this tour where they meet with all the public market investors and kinda tell their story, and they call that a roadshow. Bankers would kinda take them around on a little private jet, and they're, you know, meeting with, like, insurance companies in Iowa or whatever and telling telling them about the machine god. So that's gonna be just like kind of amusing on its own. But, you know, they need to tell, I think, a new growth story because they're going to say, okay, we had this, like, coding product that's incredible, but, like, it's already kind of showing... Slowing down in growth. What's our next growth story? Well, they believe that AI is going to, you know, solve many, many, many problems in the world. And so one of the stories that they're pitching to investors now is this bio thing. You know, AI is gonna cure cancer. Like, AI is gonna develop new drugs. So that's like a big story they're gonna probably be pitching. And then they have other products too, like, you know, legal tech or, like, other other ways that AI is going to kind of disrupt the economy beyond just coding, which has been, again, like, a blockbuster hit for them.
00:09:03 · Erin Griffith, Max Read
[00:09:03] S3: So in a week or so, Anthropic is going to basically go on this tour where they meet with all the public market investors and kinda tell their story, and they call that a roadshow. Bankers would kinda take them around on a little private jet, and they're, you know, meeting with, like, insurance companies in Iowa or whatever and telling telling them about the machine god. So that's gonna be just like kind of amusing on its own. But, you know, they need to tell, I think, a new growth story because they're going to say, okay, we had this, like, coding product that's incredible, but, like, it's already kind of showing... Slowing down in growth. What's our next growth story? Well, they believe that AI is going to, you know, solve many, many, many problems in the world. And so one of the stories that they're pitching to investors now is this bio thing. You know, AI is gonna cure cancer. Like, AI is gonna develop new drugs. So that's like a big story they're gonna probably be pitching. And then they have other products too, like, you know, legal tech or, like, other other ways that AI is going to kind of disrupt the economy beyond just coding, which has been, again, like, a blockbuster hit for them. [00:09:58] S1: Right. One thing I wanna talk about with the s one is the 93 page risk factor section. So you've read a lot of s ones before. Are they are [00:10:06] S3: they Every every word of everyone, just [00:10:08] S1: to be clear. Obviously, your capacity as a as a reporter. Are they usually 90 pages long?
00:10:08 · Max Read, Erin Griffith
[00:10:08] S1: to be clear. Obviously, your capacity as a as a reporter. Are they usually 90 pages long? [00:10:13] S3: I mean, they're usually pretty long, and it's a lot of legalese. It's just like a lot of ass covering, basically. Mean, it's it's like... It's basically anticipating all the potential things that shareholders could get mad and sue over and saying, we warned you. [00:10:25] S1: Right. Exactly. And there's a lot of those for Anthropic. I'm just gonna read a couple of them right now. [00:10:28] S3: They're they're very unique in their specificity, let's just say. [00:10:31] S1: Yeah. And I would say too, it's funny reading them if you've been following AI for a while. Like, it's kind of like getting six years of Twitter and blog posts and Substack, like, compressed into, like, a document of legalese because they're listing everything from, you know, the resource constraints on building out compute to the various sort of AI safety problems to just sort of like your your basic business problems with, you know, customer satisfaction. But the ones that caught my eye, for example, are concerns have been raised both within our organization and by other researchers that sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity. This is a pretty rare kind of thing to do. Another one that I was really... It
00:10:31 · Max Read, Erin Griffith
[00:10:31] S1: Yeah. And I would say too, it's funny reading them if you've been following AI for a while. Like, it's kind of like getting six years of Twitter and blog posts and Substack, like, compressed into, like, a document of legalese because they're listing everything from, you know, the resource constraints on building out compute to the various sort of AI safety problems to just sort of like your your basic business problems with, you know, customer satisfaction. But the ones that caught my eye, for example, are concerns have been raised both within our organization and by other researchers that sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity. This is a pretty rare kind of thing to do. Another one that I was really... It [00:11:16] S3: really fast. Can we just go back to that really quick, though? Because one thing that the great Matt Levine at Bloomberg pointed out was that this is written in passive voice. It's not Anthropic saying we think [00:11:27] S1: Right. [00:11:27] S3: That our products... It's it's... It says, like, some people may be saying. [00:11:32] S1: Within our organization, some people... I I don't know if it's our founder and president Dario Amodei or anybody, but some people have raised [00:11:39] S3: this question. Who can it be?
00:11:39 · Erin Griffith, Max Read
[00:11:39] S3: this question. Who can it be? [00:11:40] S1: Yeah. Another one that I I I like is, in addition, considerations relating to model safety, interpretability, alignment, and welfare may lead us to limit or delay the deprecation of older models. So just to translate that a little bit, when they're talking about model welfare, that's they think the models might be alive, and they're not ever gonna shut down some of the product lines because they want to make sure that they get taken care of. [00:12:01] S3: What? I missed this one. [00:12:02] S1: Wait. I I I have to credit Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg for picking this one up. I'm... They're not they're not saying this out loud, but they're saying considerations relating to welfare may lead us to limit or delay the deprecation of older models. This is a little like Apple saying the iPhone 12 is alive, so we're just gonna keep making it forever. [00:12:19] S3: My god. Imagine trying to explain that to some, like, you know, analyst at Goldman Sachs and be like, we need to put this in here. [00:12:26] S1: I mean, the thing that I wonder about a lot is how much people who are spending their time talking to chatbots all day start to buy into and belong to this stuff. And so you actually will have activist investors who are saying, you know, we have to make sure that we're taking care of model welfare and whatever else. Else. This is a future coming soon. [00:12:43] S3: Well, the activist investors won't have a whole lot of ability to do much because of the governance of the company.
00:12:43 · Erin Griffith, Max Read
[00:12:43] S3: Well, the activist investors won't have a whole lot of ability to do much because of the governance of the company. [00:12:49] S1: Yeah. Let's see. I actually wanna get into this. Well, but let's start... Before we get there, let's start with just a quick word about the founders because this is a company that has a really specific philosophy around AI risk and AI safety that's sort of the core... Not just at the core of the business, but it's kind of their origin story. I'm sure a lot of people are familiar, but will you just give us the twenty second version of where Anthropic comes from? [00:13:08] S3: Sure. And this is kind of the story of AI also. You know, Google is working on AI. Elon Musk and Sam Altman see it, and they're like, man, I don't think they care enough about the future of humanity. So they start split off and start OpenAI, and they're like, we're gonna build AI, but we're gonna do it for the good of humanity. We're the principled ones. And then within OpenAI, Dario and all of his friends are looking around and saying, wait, Sam doesn't care enough about the future of humanity. We need to build the safe AI before they can. So they split off and do that. And that has like kind of continued on down the line. So that's where Anthropic is. Their roots are truly in like AI safety, and they are the probably most extreme on that spectrum of, like, the the fears inside the company at the top of the company and, you know, around it.