This is the longest section of Dario Amodei's work experience on LinkedIn by far. I genuinely think he might be happier then than he is today despite obviously having become much wealthier and successful. Also, he was proudly awarded "Star Employee of the Quarter" for Q2 2015.

When it first came out, so many smart people told me that the @citrini 2028 Intelligence Crisis article was a ridiculous sci-fi story that would never come to pass. And tbc @citrini themselves said it was a tail risk. But honestly if you revisit the piece many of the seemingly far-fetched predictions in the article are slowly, but not slowly, coming to pass. Agentic AI is making it easier to make that uncomfortable and annoying call to cancel services you don’t use. It’s also helping you shop, fundamentally changing how businesses interact with customers. The threat to jobs, esp white collar jobs in industries that already had a lot of bloat or organizational slack, is very much real. Every large western company likely could do just fine with 20-30% fewer headcount. I don’t think firms will lay off people and displace them with AI en masse now. Not when business is good and margins are rising and everyone’s just focused on meeting demand. But when the next recession or slowdown comes and companies inevitably part ways with employees, it’d be a Herculean task imo to persuade firms to hire these human workers back instead of trying to replace their work with AI or existing employees doing more with AI.

This isn’t a stock picker’s market. If you just sat in the passive market index, you did fine/well. Stock pickers, who spent lots of time analyzing the stocks they picked, are understandably upset that all that analysis was for naught and doing nothing won. Isn’t that efficiency?

Bulls will think this is extremely bullish because user penetration is low and we are still early; bears will think this is extremely bearish because user penetration is low and adoption will be much slower than bulls expect.

It was a blast indeed! Great to meet so many new people interested in compute and hang out with our friend @ani_pai on the eve of their “big secret news for nous” that turned out be a $1.5B series B round led by @robotventures.🚀 I should’ve taken a free t-shirt in hindsight! 😭

To double by 2035 in nominal terms, US GDP needs to grow on average 8%/y. So far this year, we are tracking some 6.3% NGDP growth while real GDP is only growing 2.2% so most of the contributor is inflation. It seems implausible that for at least the first 3-4 years that inflation doesn’t track higher with nominal GDP in an inflationary growth environment even if the adoption of AI incl robotics eventually does deliver strong disinflation/deflation on the back half of it. I think @dylan522p has predicted that in 2028 the US economy could grow 8% nominal with 4% real and 4% inflation. That seems optimistically plausible if we don’t get an inflationary spiral. But now imagine the scenario in which inflation is still 4% in 2028 and we haven’t had recession in between, that means that inflation likely will have hovered around 3-4% for the next 3 years. What is the Fed supposed to have done in this whole time? Unless the Fed intentionally declares a formal outright abandonment of its 2% inflation target, it’s hard to imagine that in the face of persistent inflation above 2% traveling in the wrong direction that the Fed doesn’t again declare war on inflation and go on an aggressive hiking cycle like it did in 2022 such that the target terminal rate would be whatever it takes to slow down the economy. In this scenario, if it’s to be believed, AI becomes a direct enemy of the Fed’s inflation target. Either the US abandons inflation targets and supports AI at all costs or stops/slows AI development in order to combat inflation. Fwiw, the bond market doesn’t seem to believe at all that AI will deliver meaningful increases to US GDP growth. At a yield of 5.3%, the 10y US Treasury bond is roughly consistent with 2.5-3% real GDP growth and 3% inflation over the next 10 years even if the risk premium was zero. This is clearly not consistent with 4% RDGP+4% inflation. The Occam’s razor is that the bond market is pricing a boom and then a bust in the style of DotCom. Now, a question for the AGI visionaries, which industries are the likeliest sources of significant contributors to GDP going forward? The often cited industries that use a lot of AI to improve productitivity have been elite financial hedge funds like Jane Street and large pharmaceutical companies that use AI for drug discovery etc. The trouble with these examples is that the pyramid’s base gets narrower as we approach the top. There are only so many Jane Streets in the world, leaving aside the fact that HFs are inherently zero-sum and JS will look for cheaper AI models/solutions over time. It’s also hard to imagine that pharma cos spending all of their FCFs on AI tokens. Ultimately to grow GDP, we need to just produce a lot more “stuff”. If AI drugs can lengthen lifespans, maybe that becomes a source of output. But AI is also supposed to make human workers less valuable as an input? Would love to see how maths on the macro on this. This is typically an unfair question to ask of technologists. But AI capex is so huge and the so far elusive ROI at the macro aggregate level just needs to manifest in percents of GDP growth starting basically now. That’s why so many AI researchers are making macro forecasts now I think.,

China’s foreign ministry announced that Trump and Xi reached an “eight-point consensus”. Number 3 is notable. On the issue of Iran, China has been consistent and conspicuously vocal in its support of the US’s core demands: no nuclear weapons and no tolls.

Inner Mongolia had long stopped being remembered for Genghis Khan as much as open-pit coal mines. If building lots of AI data centers means that the Mongolian grasslands can be spared of stripping for coal it’d indeed be a great thing!

Everyone is speculating about when cheap debt stops for the AI infrastructure boom. It doesn't stop, it shifts from expensive to cheaper formats. The debate is not "build or don't build." Folks are moving to standardized formats less than 25MW. 50% cheaper and built in 120 days. 🧵

Chinese city govt answers to central government so it's unthinkable in China for a private company to host high level govt meetings in any city, but US federal govt can't order the city government to prepare and host high level meetings. Indeed a big contrast btw US and China.