Benjamin Mann
Chapters
Founding Story and Company Origins
Duration: 00:00:00 - 00:04:53
Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:00): You wrote somewhere that creating powerful AI might be the last invention humanity ever needs to make. How much time do we have, Ben?
I think 50th percentile chance of hitting some kind of superintelligence is now like 20…
Strategic Framework and Process
Duration: 00:05:23 - 00:10:51
Benjamin Mann (00:05:23): Yeah, I mean I think this is a sign of the times. The technology that we’re developing is extremely valuable.
Founding Story and Company Origins
Duration: 00:10:57 - 00:15:14
Benjamin Mann (00:10:57): I think AGI is kind of a loaded term, and so I tend not to use it very much anymore internally. Instead, I like the term transformative AI because it’s less about can it do as much as people do? Can it do literally everythin…
Practical Advice and Actionable Tactics
Duration: 00:16:13 - 00:21:09
(00:16:13): But I guess to cite a couple of areas where I think things are changing quite quickly. In customer service we’re seeing with things like Fin and Intercom, they’re a great partner of ours, 82% customer service resolution rates automatical…
Founding Story and Company Origins
Duration: 00:21:19 - 00:25:23
Benjamin Mann (00:21:19): I think in that area it’s more like your team will just do dramatically more stuff. We’re definitely not slowing down on hiring at all, and some people are confused by that.
Closing Remarks and Key Takeaways
Duration: 00:26:29 - 00:31:04
(00:26:29): That was fundamentally why we left. We felt like we wanted an organization where we could be on the frontier, we could be doing the fundamental research, but we could be prioritizing safety ahead of everything else.
Founding Story and Company Origins
Duration: 00:31:08 - 00:35:55
Perfect.
Benjamin Mann (00:31:08): The idea is the model is going to produce some output with some input by default before we’ve done our safety and helpful and harmlessness training. Let’s say an example is write me a story, and then the constituti…
Founding Story and Company Origins
Duration: 00:36:48 - 00:41:15
(00:36:48): I guess now the way I think about the challenges are pretty different from how they’re laid out in superintelligence. Superintelligence is a lot about how do we keep God in a box and not let the God out.
Practical Advice and Actionable Tactics
Duration: 00:42:12 - 00:47:28
(00:42:12): We could have gone out and hyped that up and said, “Oh my God, Claude can use your computer and everybody should do this today.” But we were like, “It’s just not ready and we’re going to hold it back till it’s ready.” I think from a hype…
Personal Story and Background
Duration: 00:47:45 - 00:53:39
Benjamin Mann (00:47:45): Yeah, I think this comes back to the Economic Turing Test and seeing it pass for some sufficient number of jobs. Another way you could look at it though is if the world rate of GDP increase goes above 10% a year, then someth…
Founding Story and Company Origins
Duration: 00:53:50 - 01:00:07
Benjamin Mann (00:53:50): Yeah, so RLAIF, constitutional AI is an example of this where there are no humans in the loop, and yet the AI is sort of self-improving in ways that we want it to. And another example of RLAIF is if you have models writing c…
Founding Story and Company Origins
Duration: 01:00:12 - 01:05:17
I guess so.
Lenny Rachitsky (01:00:12): Okay, I want to zoom out and talk about just Ben, Ben as a human for a moment before we get to a very exciting lightning round. I imagine just kind of the burden of feeling responsible for safe superintelligen…
Closing Remarks and Key Takeaways
Duration: 01:05:26 - 01:11:03
Benjamin Mann (01:05:26): Yeah, and I guess I was part of Google’s Area 120 and I’ve read about Bell Labs and how to make these innovation teams work. It’s really hard to do right and I wouldn’t say that we’ve done everything right, but I think we’ve…
Closing Remarks and Key Takeaways
Duration: 01:11:10 - 01:14:32
Benjamin Mann (01:11:10): Pantheon was really good based on Ken Liu or Ted Chiang’s story. Ken Liu I think.