More than four decades separate Dario Amodei and Donald Trump. The two men's paths have crossed by timing more than anything else. Trump happens to be president right at the moment Amodei’s artificial intelligence company Anthropic is emerging as perhaps the preeminent player in that epoch-shaping new world.
Personality-wise, the two could not appear more different. Trump is a people person, easy in the company of others. For the awkward Amodei, eye contact looks like it induces physical pain.
But there is a much deeper divergence between 43-year-old Amodei and 80-year-old Trump. They symbolize a generational difference in outlook, shaped by their formative experiences. It is the doomer and the boomer.
On the last Sunday of September, Trump took in the final day of the Presidents Cup outside Chicago, flew back to Joint Base Andrews, and told reporters he had a 10 p.m. dinner with Amodei. These are "long days, but I seem to be able to handle it," Trump added, a gentle nod to his age. Earlier that day, he had previewed his line on the evening’s menu’s real main course: artificial intelligence.
"I’m for let’s go and let’s win," Trump said. Thirteen days before, he had accused his dinner guest of pretending to be a "perfect little angel" and, declaring himself "the Hoax Buster," dismissed growing fears that AI could destroy the world. That night, Amodei and his wife, Cami Clark, greeted the president at the new White House helipad.
Trump’s insults had followed Amodei’s September 12 essay, whose key sentence was an urgent plea, against the president’s instincts: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." Eleven days later, Amodei told the U.N. Security Council by video that, if managed poorly, AI could be "a risk to humanity as a whole." Amodei was in full doomer mode (though his essay counts doomerism among the accusations his company faces.) After all, he had set up Anthropic to be a safety-first lab for the development of AI, reflecting the pessimism at the core of a technological advancement that also carries so much promise. Yes, it might cure many cancers, unlock new understandings in physics, or ease some of the burdens of everyday life.
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