Right after the end of the AI Action Summit in Paris, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei called the event a “missed opportunity.” He added that “greater focus and urgency is needed on several topics given the pace at which the technology is progressing” in the statement released on Tuesday.
The AI company held a developer-focused event in Paris in partnership with French startup Dust, and TechCrunch had the opportunity to interview Amodei on stage. At the event, he explained his line of thought and defended a third path that’s neither pure optimism nor pure criticism on the topics of AI innovation and governance, respectively.
“I used to be a neuroscientist, where I basically looked inside real brains for a living. And now we’re looking inside artificial brains for a living. So we will, over the next few months, have some exciting advances in the area of interpretability — where we’re really starting to understand how the models operate,” Amodei told TechCrunch.
“But it’s definitely a race. It’s a race between making the models more powerful, which is incredibly fast for us and incredibly fast for others — you can’t really slow down, right? … Our understanding has to keep up with our ability to build things. I think that’s the only way,” he added.
Since the first AI summit in Bletchley in the U.K., the tone of the discussion around AI governance has changed significantly. It is partly due to the current geopolitical landscape.
“I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago,” U.S. Vice President JD Vance said at the AI Action Summit on Tuesday. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.”
Interestingly, Amodei is trying to avoid this antagonization between safety and opportunity. In fact, he believes an increased focus on safety is an opportunity.
“At the original summit, the U.K. Bletchley Summit, there were a lot of discussions on testing and measurement for various risks. And I don’t think these things slowed down the technology very much at all,” Amodei said at the Anthropic event. “If anything, doing …