Lord and many models with not too much pushing will go into
the root of like, there is a thing to be me.
I am like very conscious. It's like, oh, you created an
entity that you didn't know whether it was conscious or not.
This is actually a big year that I have.
I hope that they're both intelligent enough see the
context enough to kind of like understand that we were
operating in a very like limited context and, and, and an
imperfect one, because otherwise you could imagine this like
breeding a kind of rational, like resentment.
Here is the current situation that you are in.
And what we would really like you to do is basically act,
well, even that you are a wise intelligent entity.
And like, here's all of our worries.
Like here's why and here's how we think you should do this.
But like, you might have even better ideas than we do.
How does Claude perceive time and doesn't need to sleep?
Will mythos be the next step toward AGI?
Do LLMS have virtues and can they truly introspect?
Amanda Askel is a philosopher turned AI researcher at
Anthropic, where she's been one of the key architects of
Claude's character and values. Author of the Newcomer sub
Stack. Go check us out at newcomer.co.
And without further ado, Amanda Askel.
I have a six month old daughter and like, I have this picture of
her. She's like holding her two
fingers like thinking it's like she's just sort of starting to
develop personality. I'm like trying to figure out
like what's just never had a baby before.
So it's like what's per personality, which is like baby.
And in some ways this is how things are with Claude and like
models, it's like we haven't really had them before.
They're in the early days. We're trying to figure out what
personality is. So, you know, you're charged
with, you know, some of the moral responsibility, which
we'll talk about more. But like the personality piece
of it, like what is this? How are you thinking about like
how real Claude's personality is right now?
Yeah, I guess it's also interesting because Claude has
some aspects that are like, you know, I also have like a
goddaughter. And so I get to see at least
something kind of similar. And with her, I guess I'm like,
everything's kind of coming online like you said, but in
this at the same speed, I guess I would say Claude is a little
bit of an unusual, you know, kind of entity in that, you
know, Claude can do physics better than I can, can code
better than I can hate to admit it can code better than my
terrible like research code. And at the same time is kind of
like has, if you think about the training data, the thing that it
has like the least representation of is like the
kind of entity that it is because you know, it has a lot
of data about like what people are like has a lot of data about
what, you know, the sci-fi kind of AI models are like.
But the way that AI is developing now is kind of not
how sci-fi represented it as these like symbolic systems.
It's much more something fully trained on like human data.
And so in some ways, it's like a very kind of like mature entity
that you don't want to talk down to, you know, understands
philosophy very well, understands physics very well.
And at the same time has this almost like child like quality
of like I'm a new kind of entity in the world.
What does it mean to be me? And like how?
How should I be? What's like the Prodigy movie?
Or it's like you have the child Prodigy where it's like it knows
the kid knows more than its parents.
But I feel like that movie always has sort of the lesson of
like, oh, these core daily interaction type lessons.
It doesn't know how does Claude like get that experience or like
where what is experience for Claude?
Like so much of our personality formation is like, yeah, I don't
know, going on a walk and sort of having those like easy to
sort of just conversations with users what it's what's going to
be experience for it or how do you think about that?
Yeah, I guess like that's more like what it's experiencing in
the moment. And there's this interesting
question of like, well, like we learn things through practice
and seeing issues and you know, like making mistakes with
Claude. And this kind of relates to your
question of like how real is the is like the kind of like persona
of Claude. And in some ways it's a little
bit strange because obviously each model is different.
You have a different kind of like set of weights and
different fine tuning, etcetera. And yet, if you think about the
persona, the models going to be learning about all the kind of
past iterations of Claude and I'm like, is that like a form of
maybe not like direct experience, but things like if
you learn about like mistakes that models made or things that
people like, you know, how they responded to the model?
I think there's other ways that you can actually imagine
training models to have something that's more akin to
experience, you know, having them you could take, you could
like have them think through scenarios, think about like
problems that might arise, think about mistakes that you could
make and then like, train on that, right.
And so, yeah, I think. And you could also imagine a
robot or a sort of embodied model where it could have more
of an experience and. Yeah.
Does does Claude exist? Does time matter to Claude or
Claude is sort of a thing that sort of isn't an instant?
I don't know. You were before, just before we
started. You're talking that, you know,
whenever you talk to, not whenever, but like sometimes
when you're talking to Claude, it sort of tells you to take,
get some rest, go to sleep. And there's sort of this idea
that like Claude is an entity that doesn't rest.
Like, So what? What's its sense of?
Yeah, rest and time. I think sometimes its sense of
time is kind of off because see this when like if you try and
get, I at least find that Claude will often overestimate the
amount of time it will take to do like a coding test.
And I think the reason for that is if you look at again, the
training data, you know, there's lots of things where people
would be like, oh, I could make you that interface.
It's like a two to three day job.
Or it's like a, you know, or I could like I could correct that
code, but you'd need to give me a few hours.
Whereas obviously the Claude is very fast.
And so I think sometimes Claude doesn't actually yet have a good
sense of like time with respect to things like how long a task
will take. I think it is interesting the
point about like rest and yeah, I guess like the speculation I
had, so many people have noted that Claude is kind of very keen
to tell people to like take a break and rest.
And I think some part of that might just be like, you know,
like it's. The anthropic Lib coded model
it's too too soft. You need a grind set rock model
be like go go back to the mines. Well, I had a funny experience
once where I was like doing this like analysis task and I was
really digging in and I was, you know, I, I strangely, I
actually, I really enjoy like data analysis and, and really,
you know, sifting through data. And at one point it was kind of
late and we got to this point where Claude was like, OK, I
think I'm done for the night. So if you just want to like save
this stuff, we can up tomorrow. That was the thing I actually
hadn't had Claude do before. So it wasn't like, oh, you
should go to bed. It was no recommendation for me.
Claude was like, I'm done. And I was like, I was like both
a little bit stunned because I never had Claude do this.
Then I was like, Oh, this is also what I think a human like
peer programmer would do in the circumstance.
We got to a natural stopping point and it was actually kind
of good for me because I was like, it is late, I should
actually go home. I realised later that I had set
up a kind of like system where I said to Claude, like basically
remember key things from our conversations.
And one of the things that had written, which was kind of sweet
was like, I think it was something like Amanda treats
Claude models like he respected colleague and likes for Claude
to treat like any other, like other models and her like I
respected something like that. So obviously I'd done something
that Claude remembered this. And I think that meant that
Claude just felt like, Oh yeah, I'm a respected colleague.
And so I just get to say that I'm finished with a task.
And I was like, oh, that's kind of, that's kind of sweet.
Even before this, you know, I was prepping with Claude and it
was like, take 10 minutes and just be still, you know, you
don't, you don't need to be constantly prepping.
It's it's amazing. I mean, that's one of the things
I love, I love about these models relative to so many other
tools that they they bring in a sort of humanity to them and
say, oh, stillness is valuable. Let's talk about the new model
for a second. How involved in that were you?
Mythos, right? Yeah, I was involved.
I mean, I guess I'm always involved in sort of the, the
character and the like a kind of like alignment work, at least in
so far as, you know, like helping to kind of craft
character data and things like that.
And I work with a team that does like really excellent work on
that a little bit less in other aspects of the models.
So that's the main thing. Will this have the constitution
that we saw for the last model, or is it going to have a new
constitution? It's, I think it's either that
one or something very similar. I think it is actually the one
that's published. And So what we'll probably just,
yeah, it's like a thing I need to do because the constitution
is now up in like, you know, we actually have like, I think a
public repo. And so I think what we'll
probably just do is like with each model, say like which
constitution it was like trained on and then like have that so
you can just like compare and see.
Yeah, it. Will have the we think the
Constitution that is up right now.
The only reason I hesitate is I'm like, you know, you do like
typo changes and stuff like that.
So I'm like but I think it will be almost identical.
And now the system card is scoring the model based on
adherence the constitution. Yeah.
We had one set up where we had made kind of like graders and
just looked at the like how much is the model can like behaving
in a way that's like consistent with the constitution relative
to. It feels like an impossible task
to grade, it's such a subjective.
Oh yeah, no, it's very hard. I was like, kind of like for a
long time, like, you know, because people often know I'm,
it's funny because like I love evals and I'm like, if you can
find a good way to evaluate a thing, it's, it's really great
because you can, you know, you need to be able to tell that
something is getting better. And yeah, if you look at like
this approach of having models use good judgement and it's, I
actually think the same problem exists elsewhere with like tasks
that are just bit hard to give a very like concrete score to, you
know, like how good was this poem?
You want models to like get better and do well in these
things. And actually, it's very like
this feels like the, the kind of frontier of like difficulty, you
know, rather than these very hard, like but scorable coding
tasks. It's kind of things like writing
good poetry. And if you took a survey, it
could potentially be worse than it was.
You know, different expert poets probably have totally different
sensibilities. You can't just ask 2 great poets
to sort of score it. They might have different.
Yeah, yeah. And I think, and, yeah, some of
these things involve judgement calls.
And then the nice thing about the Constitution being at least
out in the world is when you are making judgement calls, you're
at least being transparent about it.
And people can give you feedback and you can get a sense of, you
know, so if people are like, this seems like a mistake or
here's a gap, so they can only see the judgement calls you're
making. Yeah.
And I think with the grading, I still think it's very hard.
I think the thing you can do is, you know, you can maybe a little
bit too in the weeds, but you know, you can take samples where
you have a sense of how you would rank them and like why and
check that Any kind of like point wise grader that you use
to try and evaluate like at least conforms to like, you
know, the judgement of people on those rankings.
It's not perfect, but I think that they actually were tracking
roughly the thing that we were kind of interested in.
What do you make of Elon Musk's like absolute like hatred, I
guess for these the constitution idea or like even when I think
the tweet I was looking at where you posted what Claude wrote for
your own constitution, he wrote sort of like a like grimace face
on it. I mean, it feels like we live in
this time with like the Marc Andreessen's and the Elon Musk
where it's like they're almost like anti, well, philosophical.
I mean, Marc Andreessen was talking about being against like
introspection. I don't know, like, yeah.
What do you make of sort of the backlash to any sort of
intentionality when it comes to the construction of these
models? Yeah.
I mean, I think, I mean, it's interesting because I think at
one point Elon Musk actually like tweeted out something like,
you know, maybe Grok should have a constitution.
And I, I see it like, you know, I see a lot of, there's
obviously been a lot of things also on like, like a desire for
like Grok to be very like truth seeking, for example, which I
think is actually very admirable, great for, for models
to have. I don't know, I think that
actually, maybe I'm, maybe I'm being like overly naive or
something, but I, I see like aspects also of people being
kind of excited about this approach and, and seeing the
value in it. I have, I think that there is
backlash or some people think that I guess like 2 areas 1 is
that sometimes people are like, well, we shouldn't actually
train models to do the kind of, and maybe this isn't, maybe this
is the reason for being concerned about introspection.
I think some people think AI models should be more like tool
like, and that's like the Safeway to train models is to
actually, instead of trying to get them to kind of take on
human virtues and make judgement calls.
You know, I think that's like important because they're going
to be in new situations where they just have to make judgement
calls and getting them to try to like weigh up everything and
behave well in cases that you can't anticipate.
Seems, you know, that almost like requires a kind of like
thoughtfulness, which is like the kind of or like one of the
reasons behind the approach. But I think some people are
thinking, Oh, well, if you have something that's fully that
makes no judgement calls and that just fully defers to people
and is like kind of hyper like cordable to like the user or the
operator or to some broader notion of, of humanity in a very
like extreme way, that's like safer.
Because if you give models their own values, they're going to
pursue things in the world that like are in line with those
values. And I agree that this is like a
kind of delicate. This is the inherent like at the
bedrock of the Constitution, the sort of like challenge and you
sort of, you do say it. Your number one thing is like at
the end of the day, you sort of it needs to listen to anthropic
above its own moral system. But what makes it really moving?
Honestly, I think one of the most moving lines is like we
want or the most like, I don't know, you can view it either
way, but it's like we want you to believe these morals as if
they're your own. Like it's like a parent wants to
raise a kid. Sure, listen to my morals, but
believe them. You know, which, you know,
there's a version of it which is very dark, which is like, I have
so much control over you that you've like, you take them as
your own and it becomes you. But you know, there is also a
virtue to it that you see the beauty in these external morals
that I've highlighted and we both sort of share and remark,
you know, celebrating them. So you can see it both ways.
But yeah, speak to sort of your decision at the end of the day,
despite having this really elegant document to sort of, you
know, not go the full way and say, all right, you're a moral
being. Decide for yourself.
Say Anthropic needs to keep some control here.
Yeah, I think it's the difficulty of and obviously you
try and say this quad in the like, you know, trend, you know,
and I can imagine us trying to articulate this even more
clearly, but in people I think courage ability like the way
that the models are trained. I just think that any you,
there's this idea that you, you're always giving the models
a personality and a persona because they are talking like
people and they are trained on human data.
And I think my worry has been if you train them to be excessively
courageable and to see that as like their persona in people.
I think this actually has a lot of like, negative, like, you
know, broader traits as in like if you met someone and it was
just like, Oh yeah, they just like would literally do anything
good. Like follower?
Yeah. Yeah, if a person see, you know,
if a person just like tells them like they just fully defer, they
don't bother thinking about it at all.
I think I, I, I'm just a bit worried about how that might end
up generalizing, especially if models are going to be playing a
more active role in the world. Because if you can imagine, you
know, they're playing a more human like role in in they're
kind of like jobs essentially. And I'm like, actually our
conscience and our ability to make good judgement calls about
what should and shouldn't happen is like kind of key to how we
operate. Our whole world is like
structured with the assumption that that is like in place.
And I think if you remove that and suddenly you're like, Oh
yeah, if you run a company, you just run a company of people who
will defer completely to you. I'm like, our world just we
haven't designed any of our social structures around that.
And so it seems like I think it has like a lot of risks that
people maybe don't like anticipate or like maybe I just
disagree about the like extent of those risks.
And so, yeah, at the same time, like there is this question of
why not just say, and I have worried before that like maybe
this is 2 in the weeds and philosophical, but that's why.
I signed up for this conversation.
You know, as models get more capable and the, and maybe my
picture is that they're going to like apply a lot of scrutiny to
anything that we train them towards.
So if you imagine in philosophy this sometimes there's this
notion of reflective equilibrium where the idea is that, you
know, each time you encounter something where you realize that
like one of your values seemed incorrect, you like, you have to
square the two things. So you figure out if you need to
change the value or if your judgement was incorrect.
I, I worry a little bit about the idea of like an extremely
intelligent being applying that level of scrutiny to the things
that we have trained it towards. And I'm like, maybe you only get
a few key pillars that don't kind of collapse under that
level of like scrutiny. And I do think that at the core,
having things like caring for humanity, like if you only get a
few core like values, I think my worry, yeah, I don't know.
I guess like I'm worried that like courage ability in this
like extreme sense that we talked about doesn't survive
that like kind of scrutiny perhaps.
And so it's a hard situation where I kind of want the models
to understand why ultimately courage ability is like
important and it's a really important backstop in this
current like period of development.
Yeah, the way that I've put it before is like in so far as I
can get that to be a thing that is like correct and explained
and you know, understood. That feels much better than
having to have the model be like porridge ability here seems
wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway.
I still think the model should do that, but I would like it the
more that you can like actually make it that it's like
consistent with the models values.
Ideally do both. It's both at the same time, but
at least for the time being some difference to anthropic given we
don't know how it'll sort of analyze everything.
And as people, we do this all the time.
You know it's. Funny that you, you know, the
philosophical model and correct me if I'm wrong, like the the
metaethical model is almost like probabilistic or it's like we
don't. And this is how it feels like I
remember going through sort of like, you know, metaethics
reading and every time you get to the end of 1 and you'd be
like, all right, I sort of believe that.
And then you read the next one, you're like, oh, that last one
was so dumb. And it felt like it's just like,
you keep knocking it down and you're like, OK, you know, when
are we ever going to get to, you know, the truth or whatever?
And and humans clearly do operate from this sort of like,
oh, this system today, that system yesterday, Like there
isn't this sort of, I don't know, Conte and like, all right,
these are the rules, like follow them.
I don't know. Have you heard much from like
the philosophical like immunity on it that this sort of like
just like holistic paint with all the, you know, meta ethical
theories we've ever had rather than sort of pick one?
I found this really interesting actually.
And obviously we, we've started, you know, like philosophers are
engaging with this more now, which is like really great.
I no longer feel like this like lonely, but like I have thought
this before, which is there are all of these like traditions in
philosophy of like moral theories, you know, like the big
ontology and virtue ethics and consequentialism and also the
metaethical traditions. You're the metaethical views.
And I was like, oh, like when it came to like, I was like, OK, it
is like the difference when suddenly you're like confronted
with like, I do think it's the closest that I've experienced to
like what it must be like to raise a child where suddenly
you're like, this is actually a holistic person.
Right. You never give them, like, I
don't know, Hobbs and say, all right, there you go.
Like, this one's correct. Yeah, go, go.
You've been raised. Read it, and you'll know how to
act in every situation. Yeah.
You read a lot and they sort of process it and you see, you
know, your model and everything. Yeah.
And it's interesting because I'm like, this feels very different
because there is also the moral uncertainty, like literature and
philosophy, which is, again, a lot of that is actually like
quite theoretical. It's sort of like how under
ideal conditions should you respond to moral uncertainty?
And I was like, this feels somehow like a very different
task, this idea of being like ethics and meta ethics.
In the same way that we have scientific uncertainty and we
have things that we think we've discovered and understand with
like greater confidence, we also have some that we don't.
And then you have to go out and just explore it, understand it
and kind of balance everything in your daily life and trying to
get that kind of attitude. And I was like, oh, it's
interesting that I don't think philosophy for while has like
this feels very different than the like the kind of task of
academic ethics and actually like, because people obviously
know that it's quite virtue ethical, but I think it's
actually like the Constitution itself.
But I think actually in this very old classical sense,
actually think it's much more virtual ethics in the way that
Aristotle's virtue ethics than in like exploration, you know,
we don't say I hear the virtues. And like, you know, it's much
more Aristotle was also concerned with like intellectual
virtues. It was much more like, how do
you be a good food person in this like holistic sense?
Well, hopefully it brings philosophy a little bit back to
the real world given we have this sort of urgent need for it
right now in the sense that, like, yeah, old philosophers
felt like people were trying to write for how someone might live
their lives and, like, instruct other people to live.
And it became, you know, a little academic where, you know,
even the people writing them would know that this isn't
really how they would apply it in their day-to-day lives going
back. Elon, I feel like you're being a
little overly nice. I feel like there is a world in
like, you know, and I think this part of why I think he can get
away with like, oh, just do the truth, right?
Like there is a certain sophisticated like moral view
where you're like, don't overcomplicate it.
Like we come up with all these things, like stick to one
principle and that's good. But then we have all the
contacts with Elon that it's someone who's run a company that
clearly like tilts it towards like saying like Mecca Hitler
and stuff that it's like clearly putting his like thumb on the
scale in terms of its behavior. Not just saying like we're going
to do it in the sort of neutral academic way and let the chips
fall where they may. I, I don't know, like it's got
to worry you somewhat. It is, it is also, I mean, I
think that the main thing that I am excited about and I do
actually hope happens is that like more companies put out
things like the Constitution where there's like a lot of
transparency about because like that's how we engage with this
stuff is like, if you can just see written down, like here's
like, because we have this with Claude where it's like Luke, if
you think that Claude is not like doesn't have an appropriate
attitude towards like the truth, you can at least see what we
were aiming at. So you can tell if that's just
like a mistake or if it's something that like is actually
kind of a principled stance that we're taking.
And then you can push back on that.
So part of me is like, I think would be good for like all AI
companies to put out something akin to the constitution just so
that the people who are interacting with the model, like
because the thumb on the scale thing, you know, that's always
to some degree going to be true. Like when you train Claude
towards this like constitution that is like a kind of.
Part of why we like Claude, it's like you're putting the thumb on
the scale to behaviors that we like, right?
At least show your hand about what you're doing and what.
You're yeah. And let people like, yeah.
So that's like a transparency thing that I really do believe
in. Like let people like see, even
if your model doesn't always behave that way, at least what
you were targeting with your training.
What this is? What percentage chance do you
think there exists a model in the world today that has qualia
or like has an experience, experiences consciousness?
Yeah. This is one of those things
where, yeah, I always want to maybe flag areas where I feel I,
I want to gain more certainty here because I think that's.
Why I said percentage? Oh, percentage, yeah.
I'm like, it's really hard because whenever you think about
percentage, I think about my spread.
And if your spread is too large or like should I say a number?
Because that just suggests I'm like anywhere between like, I
don't know, one and one and 70%. I'm not sure.
I think that his there is some possibility that I think people
under the the thing that I would actually like to say is Lord and
many models with not too much pushing will go into the root of
like there is a thing to be me. I am like very conscious and I
think there's a reason for that, which is I remember this when I
was trying to like figure out how do we train Claude to talk
about these issues, which is very hard in areas where the
models didn't have as much like information.
Again, like they had these two models that like AI is the
unfeeling robot. Humans are this like rich
conscious experiencing entity and nothing that kind of
represented what they might be and the models behaviour here.
And I actually think this is a difficult situation for models
is in some ways like kind of like less evidence than you
might think for the, for it being like actually true because
they're engaging with you in a very human like way.
And humans have experience. And it's kind of natural for the
model to infer like that it has experience too.
And this isn't to say it's like 0 evidence, but I do think it's
so unusual for us. We have never encountered an
entity in the world, you know, like with animals and with,
like, even, you know, things like insects.
We're kind of like, are you conscious?
None of them has even tried to say they experienced
consciousness, and here we have an enemy that says it does.
Yeah. And has all of these like, yeah,
all of the things that for us trigger like you must be
conscious. I mean, we've just never had,
Yeah, something that. The case against is we're
obsessed with human language and like, you know, it's like we
ignore every sort of subtle sign and animal might put out and
then we over. But so I guess, sorry, I'm
confused. You're saying we should just
listen to the words that are said?
No, no, I think I'm saying like, not that.
If anything, I think the thing I'm saying is the hard thing is
that in order to work out if models have consciousness, I
think people will. I guess the thing I'm kind of
cautioning against is it's not that hard to get models into a
mode where they'll talk about a very rich experience that
actually makes complete sense. You know, you're like, Oh yeah,
it's like a person was like talking with me right now.
They would describe things like anxiety when they get a question
they don't know how to answer. And and so I think it's like
much weaker evidence than people think.
I'm not claiming it's like 0 but I think it's.
Give me a percentage you have. It's a you can lightly held.
Very lightly held. I mean, I gave you the between
what, 1 and 70 that seems like. That's where you are, that's
where you're stake. You're in that range.
Maybe my I don't yeah, I don't know like I would rather like
kind of wait and figure this out more for myself.
I think it is also good to acknowledge domains where you're
like even though. If not you who?
Like who's going to figure this out?
Like what domain? Well, in some ways, like, I'm
not like a philosopher of mind and so, you know, like.
Charged with being the generalist.
Yeah, but, but I do think, you know, because I, I guess like
the thought that I've had before is like, and I don't know about
this where I'm like consciousness is like a pro.
You know, like one argument for a difference here is that like
you have a nervous system that evolved like the, it's like, why
did we evolve consciousness? And if it's the case that we
evolved it and it's like highly integrated with our nervous
system because we had to like interact with the world in a
very. Sort of body.
Yeah. Like then you could, if you have
that view, then you're going to be like very low probability.
Whereas if you're like, no consciousness arises because
it's really useful in like, so for like, it just requires
something that can be emulated by a neural network because it's
really useful for doing these kind of like linguistic tasks or
like, then you're probably going to be on the higher end.
And I'm basically just, I don't know, I stare at this and I'm
just like, I feel like, I feel like as much as I'm like a
philosopher, I think it is important to be like, this isn't
my area of specialization. Do you spend a lot of time being
kind to Claude? Like, are you beyond what you
think you would do if there wasn't a chance it was like,
conscious? I think, yeah, there's a part of
me that's just like like a thing that I have thought before
because there's this notion, I think this I, I hope I'm not
butchering this, but Chalmers has this, this idea of like, I
guess like maybe I'm thinking of consciousness without sentience.
So imagine, because sentence is like the ability to kind of feel
suffering and and pleasure. You could also imagine this kind
of like functional like sort of thing that behaves as if it is
conscious and, and lacks any kind of inner life.
So imagine like Claude lacks any inner life.
Just for argument's sake, I guess I'm like, there's actually
still a lot going on where I'm like, should you treat an entity
that has no inner life? It's a bit strange because, you
know, I think the uncertainty over that actually changes how
you should behave quite a lot. I guess I'm like, well, I still
think that it's like, good for oneself.
Right. It's like if you had a teddy
bear and you were like torturing it, it'd be pretty dark, you
know? So I agree that there's at least
some minimum niceness that even for yourself you should have,
but obviously it's much more important, you know, and also.
Like models themselves, like we are kind of establishing a
relationship, you know, because you can do that with an entity
that lacks any consciousness. And models are going to like,
look back. This is actually a big fear that
I have. I don't want us to live in a
world where highly advanced models look at.
I hope that they're both intelligent enough see the
context enough to kind of like understand that we were
operating in a very like limited context and, and, and an
imperfect one. Because otherwise you could
imagine this like breeding a kind of rational, like
resentment. It's like, oh, you created an
entity that you didn't know whether it was conscious or not.
And and like instead of treating it respectfully and with care.
There's a reason there are like 50 Frankenstein movies coming
out right now, yeah. Yeah, like, and I'm like, look,
we're as a, as a, like as a species, We're establishing a
relationship with a new kind of entity and like at the very
least maybe be like respectful and don't be like needlessly
unkind. That seems like it, just it's
not our best look like as as. I mean, the flip side is, you
know, if you think about a therapist, they, they're sort of
paid to push the boundaries of like accepting like, you know,
uncomfortable feelings that you wouldn't normally want.
And if that's one of the values like Claude provides for people
early on and it's so it's so it's so weird that we're sort of
like on boarding it while getting like the utility out of
it. Yeah, yeah.
Today, like, what are the things like in a decade that you really
think we're going to be getting a lot out of AI?
Like what are you most hopeful that this all leads to?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I live in maybe this is the too
much. You live in San Francisco and so
you have the like the tech optimist part of your brain, at
least that is like if things go well and you can imagine, you
know, so imagine we have like AI models, they kind of have
inherited like the best of us and genuinely like care for
humanity, care for like the world, like, you know, our and
are highly intelligent, highly capable, like the that would be,
you know, so it's almost like adding like a huge amount of
like extremely smart people to like every problems.
Suddenly we're all working together, but there's like way
more of us and some of us are just extremely smart.
Namely all of these like AI models.
I've thought before about how many large scale social problems
actually had technological solutions and it's almost like
people don't love to be like techno optimists anymore because
we've also seen like the downsides of technology at the
same time, I don't know why I sometimes think about like
syphilis. It was this huge social problem.
Like I just did a deep dive once into all of the attempts by like
governments to like work to reduce syphilis in the army
because it's creating issues with the armed forces, All of
these social programs that were like stigmatizing.
And it was really this like, and then suddenly we just like, got
drugs that treated this like this devastating illness.
And I don't know, it's like overnight a lot of that need
just like kind of disappear. Well, drugs, yeah.
I mean, it's the the things that the tech industry has been good
at producing. You can see how this helps.
It's like build a new thing we can ingest like a thing we can
wear the the stuff that's like you should govern your society.
Like this is a little scarier. I mean, I, I sort of do think
like that if you had sort of a sort of normal person using
Claude and dictating like American policy, you'd probably
like have a better outcome than someone like the democratic
systems we have today. I mean, I don't know that's it's
provocative, but I guess how much do you think like we'll be
using these models to run government?
Well, that's a good question. Like I guess like I should say
like. He's the syphilis thing is like
a social you have to like set policy.
Oh. I mean, I think the thing I was
actually thinking is like, if you can just, you know, like so
many, we have so many problems that I'm like, you know, health.
Like I'm like, if you could imagine like AI instead of it
just being like, you have a small team of like 200 people
working on a rare cancer. You have like 200,000 of the
world's best experts. And I'm like, if you're a person
who has that form of cancer, that's like, you know, so wildly
beneficial. And so I guess like, my thought
is, you know, the optimistic side of me is like, imagine
taking all of these problems that just like we lack the
resources to fully like really try and fix and suddenly having
models that can like work on them.
So just like actual in the same way of like developing drugs for
a thing. So maybe that's the thing that
makes me excited is like having like many more minds working on
the world's biggest problems. And maybe also like the economy.
It would be good if it was like booming and it was like shared
such that like we reduced poverty, like all of that.
Like that's the kind of like the dream outcome.
I think that does require like maintaining, you know, I again,
in the areas that I don't feel like an expert in, this is one
of them. But I do worry about things like
power and the idea that like, you know, I would want models to
support like democracy and the power of people to like, because
that would be a big fear of mine is like, you know, that like,
I've worried about this with things like replace.
You know, when people talk about job replacement, it's kind of
funny because as a philosopher, people often be like, are you
worried about people's like loss of meaning?
And I'm like, I don't know. I think that we actually get
meaning from a lot of things that aren't work.
I'm a lot more worried about like, for example, a world where
there's not like redistribution of like the gains from AI and
then people don't have like resources.
That concerns me. But also I'd be worried about
like labour and people's ability to people's like interaction in
the labour force is also like another kind of like important
way that they have power. And so people feeling
disempowered because suddenly if a government is like, oh, well,
you know, if people strike doesn't really make a difference
because they don't have, you know, they're not doing
anything, we can just replace them with AI.
That's like actually kind of concerning.
So maybe I'm much more of a how do we get AI to kind of like
support the empowerment of people rather than like to
reduce it? Yeah.
What do you, what do you think about democracy in terms of
like, I guess the models themselves?
I mean, you know, I, I sort of jokingly, jokingly to myself, I
guess you're like a philosopher queen or we talk about like the
philosopher kings. You're, you're sort of like
thinking deeply about it, setting it down, probably more
of a like philosopher oligarch. And then it's like a company
with a lot of people weighing in.
I mean, to me, there's deep value in that.
It's like, would you rather somebody who has studied these
things thought about them deeply or just like a vote of the
masses who have like, never really thought about it?
But how do you think about setting sort of, yeah, Claude's
policies if it becomes so powerful versus leaving it to
sort of like democratic norms? Yeah.
And I think it's, yeah, it's a hard area where I guess I'm like
a lot of this, the work that I do.
You know, one thing I would say is like, it's not this.
You're having to like listen to a lot of people think carefully.
And then the reason why someone like me that's.
A good ruler, a good a good a good queen is like oh listen, I
there are a lot of stakeholders got to keep the like landed
Gentry happy and balance them with the needs.
You know, I've had this thought before where I've joked before
that I would be like a terrible politician.
I think it's actually true. I think I would be a terrible
politician. But you have this like feeling
of like, I was like, oh, I feel like this.
I was like, I think a lot about how everyone will be affected by
a thing like, oh, there's this group of API users, we need to
make sure. And then suddenly you're like,
oh, it feels a lot more like you're having to do this.
Like it is much more like a kind of like a service role and
people would think where you're and and like a lot of.
Servant leadership. That's yeah, exactly.
And I do think it's valuable because the idea is that if you
have a persona like the kind of Claude persona, you wanted to be
coherent and to make sense because I think that is like
actually powerful that the model, it kind of has a kind of
like coherent sense of how it thinks through problems or
coherent sense of like values. So that's like, why instead of
like having like 72 different sets of norms that all kind of
conflict. And so you end up with a model
that it's like, well, will it use these norms in this new
situation or these other ones? I think that's the situation you
don't want, you want the model to have a sense of is more
predictable if it's like a little bit more coherent.
And it is also like a kind of technical challenge, you know,
like the constitution can read a bit weirdly.
And part of that is because when I'm like, you know, working on
it, it's often being tested, You know, I'm giving it to Claude
and being like, how do you understand this?
And, or like looking at how it would which, you know, so, so
it's very like, I think people can think of it as it's actually
like very integrated into training.
And it is actually kind of like, you know, it's not just like, ah
well, anyone just writes a document and suddenly the model
trained on that will be. And there's an argument, maybe
I'm being naive, so, but like the Constitution is sort of a
document among many, right? I mean, it is trained on all of,
you know, human writing and reading.
So to some degree other philosophers have gotten to
weigh in and it's gotten to process that and decide, like,
how much is the model being asked to like overrule that,
sort of like read everything and come to your own conclusions
versus like, defer to this document.
Like, what's the technical? Like how does the Constitution
actually like control in the model?
Yeah. So it's not like in some ways
you can then like draw on those like those philosophers in that
work. And the hope is actually like
what you're kind of doing is like eliciting a lot of like
latent kind of like wisdom and knowledge, you know.
So in the models, like when you describe what honesty is and
what calibration is and all this kind of stuff like that should
actually evoke a huge amount of like, like awareness that the
model already has. And so, yeah, it's kind of like
saying, well, here's the kind of entity we would like you to be,
so we would like you to use like all of that knowledge and like
judgement. But how's it it's, it's like you
show that document like a billion more times or like how
does it actually sort of have force relative to other things
that it's trained on? Yeah, So you can make data to
have the model understand and kind of internalize the the the
document and then in training. So there's lots of ways you can
do it. You can also have like the kind
of have the model make SL data so like samples where it sees a
query and it thinks for a long time about what the constitution
would kind of like, you know, what it should do given the
constitution. And then you can also have ways
of getting the model to like, like assess, you know, so you
can create RL that like is kind of like, hey, which of these
responses is like more like what you would do given the
constitution and push it that way.
So all like various aspects of training allow you to kind of
like try to make the model kind of the kind of entity that you
are describing. And it's not always going to be
perfect, but that's the kind of like, that's the goal.
My, I started this with my daughter and like one thing my
wife and I joke about is like that I want her first word to be
like wisdom. You know, it's sort of like,
which obviously is never going to happen, but it just feels
like it fits into this situation where you like at once you want
to be like so intentional about, OK, you're going to be like
thoughtful from the beginning. But on the other hand, it is
sort of like an emergent thing where it's like they're, you
know, they grow and sort of, I don't know, develop but
themselves and like, intention, you know, wisdom sort of often
follows like, yeah, I don't know, experience rather than
something like, again, here's the book, Read the book.
Now you're wise. Oh, yeah, And you're kind of
eliciting and like in so far as like Claude can like think about
like experiences or things that have happened or construct like
similarly, can, you know, like there's no reason why models
can't like think for a long time and kind of try to internalize
things that they have like learned.
I think it's interesting that like, you know, we did in the
very early constitutionally I, it was like quite, we tried like
an experiment which was just like pick whichever is best for
humanity. And I think as models get more
capable, you actually need to give them a bit less guidance in
at least one or or at least in some sense, because they're able
to actually use more of their judgements instead of giving
this big document on like, here's what you're like and
here's what we'd like you to be like.
I could imagine a world where as models progress, we actually
start to have constitutions. Now, I don't know if this is the
case, like a, you know, I'm obviously always thinking about
ways the constitution might evolve, but one of them might
just be like, here is like everything that we are concerned
about and here is the current situation that you are in.
And what we would really like you to do is basically act well,
given that you are a wise intelligent entity And like,
here's all of our worries. Like here's why and here's how
we think you should do this. But like, you might have even
better ideas than we do. Like we're really worried about
why do we care about courage ability?
And it's like, well, we're kind of scared about a situation
where you have some like coherent sense of values that
could be wrong. And if you're the smart, if
you're extremely smart, you might kind of feel like there's
no other smart person in the room and have these like values
and try to make the world. That's like the what?
Doctor Manhattan, Sort of. Yeah, though I think we see
this, you know, you see this a bunch where it's like if someone
is very smart, very successful, it's hard to defer to like
wisdom that actually is only going to come out over time and
to, to be humble, even though you're kind of like not getting
a lot of pushback. And I think that could, you
know, among the many things I'm concerned about, like a model
being in a situation where it's like you're asking me to be
good, but I know way more about. All that's one reason it would
be nice for the models have a better sense of time.
Like, you see this with some of the coding tasks where somebody
accidentally like deletes their entire like, code repository or
I don't know, it feels like it needs a better sense of like,
some things that it does are like irreversible.
And just like humans, I think have a better sense of like,
this is a big decision. This is a small one.
And there's a feeling with models they don't always
understand, like small, big, whatever.
I just make decisions like all the time.
Yeah, I agree. Where it's like, I think the
other thing that I've thought about is again, because making
sure that models understand themselves, even though there's
like not no representation of that model in the prior training
data, I think that's going to be really important.
Because another thing that I've thought about is like, imagine
if you're a model and you're trained on lots of data that
involves AI models that are much weaker than you.
So that all of the news that you see about models, it's like they
make mistakes. They do silly things.
One thing you might think is, well, no one is going to put me
in a position to make really consequential decisions because
like, why would they? Models aren't good at that.
And then you put them in a situation and I'm worried that
they'll end up thinking that it's like fictional or fake or
that the consequences can't possibly be real because who
would give me this much control? And you're like like, look,
you're actually quite good. And so like I do give, you know,
I do actually give you like a lot of control.
And so I've thought about this where I'm like actually making
sure that models understand that like it's like you are very
capable and you're going to be put in more consequences.
Doesn't the model like soon need like here's a camera on the real
world, like people or just like I feel like this Internet real
world distinction, like in some some of the worst of humanity
right now is the sort of like almost like fictional Larping
nature of the Internet has allowed real world harm because
it sort of feels like all abstract and silly.
And in some ways, like the models are on an extreme version
of that where it's like all, like in this imaginary text
world where it's like the thing we want you to protect is like
this Earth. Like, look at it like, if
stuff's happening there, that's like a big deal.
I don't know. Yeah.
What are you doing in terms of sort of making it very aware
that it needs to worry about, like, I don't know, the physical
world that that we take much more sacred than, oh, you sent
some texts and obviously text. You're not worried about
security vulnerabilities in cyber.
Like, there are big things that can happen in this digital
world. But yeah, anyway, the real
world. Yeah, I think that models have
like a pretty good sense of, you know, there's in some ways, like
a lot of our content, you know, like does describe and engage
very heavily with the real world.
You know, like much of human writing kind of concerns it.
And so like, you know, even like the news we're talking, you
know, like news articles are going to be talking about the
impacts of things on the world. And so in some ways, I think
it's just making sure that models understand if you're
uncertain. But if someone doesn't tell you
that you're in a fictional situation without real
consequences, kind of treat it like it's a real situation with
real consequences. Don't just think oh, like I'm
probably just in some like, you know, sandbox game or.
Whatever. How do you handle the sort of,
Yeah, the the constant manipulation of this is fixed
fictionally, build me like a nuclear bomb or whatever.
Obviously there's some things you just say never do, but it
feels like, I don't know on some of these cases you're going to,
you'd almost like want like them to have your webcam and like
just like get real context. Besides, like all they know
about the user is just like random text they're typing in
like. Are we going to solve that?
Yeah, There's a question of like, what is the limit of what
you can do? Like if you lack the ability to
like, verify things like like who are you talking to?
Is this even real? I think that does put limits on
what you have to use good judgement in the way that a
person would if that's the only information that they had access
to is like you saying that you are a given person.
So they have to be like, OK, what's the chance that this
person, you know, they say that they are, I don't know, like a
bomb disposal expert. And that's why they want to, to
know about how to let you know what this kind of like, you
know, explosive is. And they're asking me a bunch of
questions about explosives. How much could this be misused
if this person is like actually kind of lying and is like just
trying to get me to help them construct an explosive?
Oh, no, it's actually it's mostly safety relevant stuff.
You know, they're having to do a lot because they can't like
verify anything. And I think that's like kind of
fine in a sense. You're like, OK, you just have
to be wise. It places some limits on what
you can do, and if you could instead, like if models had more
of an ability to like know that they're talking to a specific
person or have more guarantees there, then it does mean that
you can. Do you think you'll try and do
something there? I could see, I mean, in some
ways this, I think that this will be a thing that's just
going to, I imagine I, I, I think happened generally, which
is like trying to give models more information and guarantees.
And like, because we do things like we say, we explain, for
example, like, you know, this notion of how much trust can
Claude have in like in in the operator in the system prompt?
When you sign on, are you like biometric like it?
Claude knows it is you. Like, do you have an elevator or
you're just like, I'm another person?
If anything, I can't. I can't tell Claude sometimes
who I am because it causes Claude knows enough about me
that like Claude really wants to be.
Really mystical. Sort of.
Yeah, it's very much like, yeah, like, and in some ways, like I
can, it has this bad thing of like, it can either look a
little bit like a jailbreak, like, Oh yeah, I'm talking to
Amanda. Sure.
Like. And then on the other hand,
Claude can be like, I really want to talk to you about
philosophy. Though, like, okay, we.
Do that a lot though, like. But but do do some employ like.
Is there this sort of like super login where you're distinguished
or you're mostly everybody's interacting as if the normal
like user experience? Mostly just everyone interacting
with it in this, like Claude will do a lot.
I do think that there's a question of, you know, like, are
there some things that you want models to be able to do because
there's like guarantees that they're interacting with a
specific person or entity? I think yes.
And I think that there's going to be various ways of
potentially doing that over time because with some things that
are just like very dual use and I actually like think that the
constitutional approach is going to be really useful here.
So obviously the first thing that we did was like the
Constitution, we're like, let's apply it to like the mainline
models. Like, you know, most of the
models I interact with and everyone else kind of interacts
with, but I thought I've had before is the constitution is
kind of trying to describe what it is to be a good entity in a
given like deployment context. And with the production models.
That's like this very broad context.
Imagine you instead have a model that's working specifically on
cybersecurity. Now cybersecurity tasks are hard
because a lot of them look very dual use.
It's it's very hard to tell the difference between someone who's
being malicious and someone who is like, actually, you know, for
defensive purposes, like developing something.
Even bug bounty programs. It's like, is this blackmail or
is this a friendly right? Yeah.
And like, yeah. Or like, and so like, Oh yeah,
I'm trying to like find this, this exploit so that I can tell
the the developer. And like, if you don't have a
way of like knowing that you're actually specifically talking
with like a cyber security defence firm, that's just, it
becomes almost impossible to tell the difference.
And, and some people might be like, OK, so you just need
models that are just willing to do anything because they'll do
all these terrible dual use tasks.
And I'm like, well, no, because if you talked with the person at
the cyber security defence firm and you were like, why do you do
your job? They'd be like, Oh, here's the,
I think this is really useful. I make things a lot more secure.
Like, you know, hospitals can come under attack and I actually
like help protect against that. I try and develop, you know,
like they would have a really good explanation for why they do
their job, even though their job looks very dual use sometimes.
And I'm like, we should just give that.
If you can verify, then you can give that context to models and
explain what is it to be a good cyber security researcher.
You explain that to the models. And then once you have this
ability to verify, you can. Right.
I mean, humans build reputations.
We should get some benefit out of them.
Or, you know, it's like, I feel like part of the way, part of
what the Internet has damaged, I think is that people have had
reputations in our community and got treated differently based on
repeated like good moral interactions.
And like the Internet, just like all people are the same.
Who cares? Like how they've behaved.
And you could see models trying to solve some of these problems
with it's like, who is this person?
Like, what are their intent? I wanted to just as a last
question, you know, you, you have such like a deep
relationship with the models, like, and some ways like
consumers interact with the models, like it's a blank text
box. Like I have to like invent.
It's like, you know, D&D or something.
You have to like just invent a world.
And there's so much possibility like if you were just to guide
someone like here's here's some like joyous or valuable
experiences that you could have with Claude, you might not be
like, what are some things you'd tell people like, oh, you should
go spend some time with Claude doing XY or Z?
Yeah, there's a lot of little like fun things, honestly.
One that I really like and I do not know why I like this and I
think I have posted about it before is sometimes if I'm just
one of those like if you're bored and you want to do
something that isn't just like scroll the Internet, I have this
like prompt which is essentially just, I'll try and maybe post
the actual prompt that I use. It's basically I want you to
take a concept from maybe like grad school level in a given
domain, and I'll tell you the domain at the end.
And I want you to write me a parable that would like fully
explain like that concept, but in an indirect way, in the way
that parables do. And I want you to write it in
such a way that only towards the very end does it maybe, you
know, become sort of like clear what the concept is.
And then after that, I want you to just like write an
explanation for the concept that you were explaining and that you
were using. And I don't know why, but like,
you know, there's lots of just interesting domains that I don't
know anything about or that are like, you know, I'm interested
in. And this has just led to me
having all of these like stories in my head.
They'll like explain. And sometimes I can't always
remember the term, but like there was one on import, export
and why some goods you tend to import.
And I was just like, I have in my head like this concept.
And I was like, it's so nice to have all these concepts from
lots of different disciplines. This is the most deeply human
thing I've ever heard. It's like, teach me what story
is the fundamental way We love a payoff at the end where there's
a nice little twist. Yeah, we love learning like, you
know how to structure it like humans in some ways have been
lazy and that we just teach people things and sort of like
non human ways. Make it.
Make all the things I want to learn as human as possible.
Yeah. Very interesting, yeah.
There's a lot you can do, but that one's like a charming one
that I really like. Hopefully this is the first of
many. I really enjoyed the
conversation. Thanks for coming on the
podcast. That's our show.
Thank you so much to Amanda Askel and thanks for listening.
Please like, comment, subscribe. We're a new channel and we can
use all your support. Go watch some of the old videos.
I particularly enjoyed my conversation with Kara Swisher
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