[HN Gopher] The Making of Dario Amodei
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       The Making of Dario Amodei
        
       Author : spenvo
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2025-07-29 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bigtechnology.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bigtechnology.com)
        
       | pamelafox wrote:
       | I generally am impressed by Anthropic's focus on safety, but I
       | was taken aback by this quote from Dario:
       | https://bsky.app/profile/kylierobison.com/post/3lujbtfdzyk2e
       | 
       | "Unfortunately, I think 'no bad person should ever benefit from
       | our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business
       | on."
       | 
       | I agree, it is hard to run a business on that principle, but I
       | also thought that if any AI company were to aspire to it, it
       | would be Anthropic.
        
         | landl0rd wrote:
         | There are huge differences in principle and practice between
         | "no bad person should benefit" and "we should minimze the
         | number of bad people who benefit and the extent to which they
         | benefit."
         | 
         | The former makes basically anything impossible and whatever you
         | release will be an accession to the latter. I think the only
         | way you can get to "no bad person" is to shut down. The latter
         | means putting in some higher amount of work and continuing to
         | look for ways to reduce the amount of bad enabled or created.
        
           | pamelafox wrote:
           | That's true, I am continually learning to temper my idealism,
           | particularly when working in developer tools and education.
        
         | derektank wrote:
         | I don't understand why any business would endeavor to not
         | benefit all people. Like, we should expect grocery stores to
         | benefit bad people. We should expect payment processors to
         | benefit bad people. We should expect clothing retailers to
         | benefit bad people. The goal shouldn't be to prevent bad people
         | from benefitting, the goal should be to prevent bad people from
         | leveraging your business toward their malicious aims. Even the
         | worst people have completely neutral or even benevolent
         | objectives some of the time.
        
           | andy99 wrote:
           | > the goal should be to prevent bad people from leveraging
           | your business toward their malicious aims
           | 
           | The goal should be non-judgement. It's subjective what's
           | "bad" in many cases, and so the best policy is to not pass
           | any judgement, lest someone who comes along and thinks what
           | you're doing is bad decides to prevent you from doing it.
           | 
           | We already have (tautologically) laws against doing illegal
           | stuff, we don't need some extra layer of corporate policing.
        
           | wrsh07 wrote:
           | The context of that quote was around finding funding from UAE
           | / Saudi Arabia / etc
           | 
           | If you run a clothing shop you don't need to take investment
           | from bad people. Yes everyone gets to wear the clothes / use
           | the ai model. But that wasn't what he was talking about (and
           | in that same leaked memo was enthusiastic about giving more
           | people access to Claude)
        
       | apwell23 wrote:
       | > has grown its annualized recurring revenue from $1.4 billion in
       | March 2025 to $3 billion in May
       | 
       | wonder if dario himself came with 'vibe limit and blame users
       | later' strategy. Has to be one of slickest moves in business.
        
       | bravesoul2 wrote:
       | If you are exceptionally talented, work hard, born in the right
       | place and on top of that extremely lucky (and perhaps unlucky
       | with family tragedy). You can do this too! Hats off to him, and
       | its an interesting story, but I could almost read Prince
       | William's story for inspiration too.
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-29 23:00 UTC)