It's interesting because people have been talking about the potential downsides or serious risks of AI for some time. And I think a lot of people have been saying why is this the moment where it sort of escaped the bubble and is now all of a sudden an international topic of such intensity. And I think a few things have happened. One, the models have gotten so good, and people for a long time looked at the models, maybe they looked at the rate of progress, but I don't think people really felt that the models were going to come this far this fast.
We will get it right. By the way, I am very confident in our approach. I think the biggest thing that has changed is this thing that our industry has been talking about for a while, which is: no, no, this technology, this approach is going to go very far. These models are in some ways going to become more capable, smarter than people. That finally happened. So I think that was a big change to why now. When people say, you know, my probability of doom is X or Y or whatever, it hits in a different way. Technology to do — somebody else wants to build like a hacking bot, okay, the world can decide what they think about that. But I think you also see a real fear that some of these companies or some companies developing AI could get too much power and be able to sort of exert undue influence on the economy, push worldview out on people.
And I think the world is right to be afraid of this. So we have these two big challenges. We have the potential of a loss of control accident or some other serious thing that could go wrong. We have the potential of way too much power concentration, and people fear that those developing AI could exert their worldview. And there is a sort of narrow path we have to navigate with pragmatism, with steadiness, with the ability for the world to trust that we will make dependable decisions, consistent decisions through this. And I think people are saying, well, you know, this now seems pretty important, like let's get it right.
I'm not going to get the days of the week exactly right here, but something on like a Friday or a Saturday, these models have gotten so good so fast that we need to treat the alignment and monitoring and security with a new level of rigor. And we have to be willing to pace our development of capabilities such that alignment, safety, and monitoring are always ahead of capabilities. And the Hugging Face incident triggered a real reset not just in our own company but I think the whole industry.
You know, we're in the cyber area today, but maybe we move into another area. Is this a fair way to characterization, or am I — or is this unfair to characterize it like this?
What I really care about is that we have got a great culture of accident reporting and learning. I think if we look at what happens with the FAA and the NTSB and how safe airplanes have gotten, as I understand it from talking to people who have really studied new kinds of technology on the order of magnitude of airplanes, one of the things that has gone so well there is the culture of accident reporting. Accidents are going to happen. We're going to learn as much as we can and react from each one. And there's other kinds of technology where I don't think society's had the same response and I don't think we have improved as much.
I think this is one of the most profound changes to how we use technology that I've ever seen. I mean, sci-fi movies, as you mentioned, have been hinting at this or playing around with this for a long time, but this is one of those moments where it feels like you're in the movie. Like, the sci-fi thing came true. You're talking to your personal super assistant and you are working ten times faster or better or more creatively than you could have before.
Sam, you're invited back anytime you want to Dreamforce.
Hold on, I'm going to hold you back. Thank you.
Show me what the future was, and it's been an incredible experience. Show it to you for the first time. The customer at the end of it said for the first time, for the first time they saw that true value. Now I want to just tell you we are here to do many things with you. Now as you know we are here to excite you coming to San Francisco and thank you for coming to this incredible Dreamforce.
We are going to have an amazing day. We're going to have an amazing conference. And let me just tell you this: we have never been more excited about a Dreamforce in our history. This is going to be absolutely incredible.
And here we have the CEO of Anthropic right here, Dario. Hello, Dario. How are you?
Great to have you. Fantastic. Great job, Dario. You're doing an amazing job leading the AI industry, guiding it all right from our Slack headquarters building. We watch you every day.
I'd say, hey, first of all, let's look at our own record, right? We may not have had this big high-profile incident, but I'm sure we're not perfect. Let's look at everything and we can always be better. Let's make our practices better. Let's recommit to transparency. Let's invest more in safety. Then let's organize the rest of the industry and say, what can we do to set standards for everyone? What can we do to make everyone's standards better? And then finally, there should be an international component to it. And that's essentially the three-step plan that I laid out in the essay. The first of which we committed to, and the others of which we're going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry about. And I think that's the way to lead the industry forward, to set an example, to say that everyone can always be better.
You know, it's been the pace of the progress, not just of the technology but of the economic side of it. So we — you know, I formulated the scaling laws along with some of my co-founders, which tell you that AI models get smarter and smarter the more compute you throw into them. And so we had a prediction of just how capable these models would be. But I think what we didn't appreciate is that it would lead to these companies growing so fast, to all these incredible products that we're working together on and you've been talking about today, and how quickly they would become central to everything that's going on in the world, right?
Say, you know, yes, we have to keep our eye on the pace of AI. You know, it's been amazing what's happened over ten years. No one could have written the story.
When I look at the technology versus how much it has diffused, even if we freeze the technology in place — which we're not doing, pacing the frontier is not doing that at all, the technology will keep getting better — but just suppose we freeze it in place. Even if that were the case, we're making use of maybe only five or ten percent of what the possible value of the technology is.
Congratulations. Well done. We're going to do incredible things together. You're doing a great job. Thanks for everything you're doing for the whole industry. We're so grateful to you.
