Lenny Rachitsky: Do you have any advice for folks that want to try to get ahead of this? Benjamin Mann: I'm not immune to job replacement either. At some point it's coming for all of us. Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Benjamin Mann. Holy moly. What a conversation. Ben is the co-founder of Anthropic. He serves as tech lead for product engineering. He focuses most of his time and energy on aligning AI to be helpful, harmless, and honest. Prior to Anthropic, he was one of the architects of GPT-3 at OpenAI. In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including his thoughts on the recruiting battle for top AI researchers, why he left OpenAI to start Anthropic, how soon he expects we'll see AGI. Also, his economic touring test for knowing when we've hit AGI, why scaling laws have not slowed down and are in fact accelerating and what the current biggest bottlenecks are. Why he's so deeply concerned with AI safety and how he and Anthropic operationalize safety and alignment into the models that they build and into their ways of working. Also, how the existential risk from AI has impacted his own perspectives on the world and his own life and what he's encouraging his kids to learn to succeed in an AI future.
Why he's so deeply concerned with AI safety and how he and Anthropic operationalize safety and alignment into the models that they build and into their ways of working.