Claude St. John > Quotes

“The entire logic of his departure: the conviction that the way you build AI matters as much as what you build, that safety must be foundational rather than supplementary, that the organizational culture and governance structure of an AI company are not merely business decisions but moral ones—”
― Claude St. John, The Scaling Curve: Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the Race to Build and Survive Superintelligence

“Dario has described this with a precision that suggests he has thought about it many, many times. The difference between his father most likely dying and most likely living came down to timing—a few years of scientific progress. Had the research moved a little faster, had the funding been a little larger, had the right minds converged on the problem a little sooner, his father might have survived. The margin between life and death was not a mystery of fate. It was a problem of speed.”
― Claude St. John, The Scaling Curve: Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the Race to Build and Survive Superintelligence

“He is, fundamentally, a scientist. He approaches the most consequential questions of his era the way he approached math as a child in San Francisco: looking for the objective answer, the thing that is true regardless of what anyone wants it to be.”
― Claude St. John, The Scaling Curve: Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the Race to Build and Survive Superintelligence

“It is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else’s vision. You might think they’re not doing it the right way. You might think they’re dishonest. Who knows—maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. But what you should do is take some people you trust and go off together and make your vision happen.”
― Claude St. John, The Scaling Curve: Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the Race to Build and Survive Superintelligence

“The world was about to be changed by a technology whose trajectory could be predicted only by people who understood exponential curves”
― Claude St. John, The Scaling Curve: Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the Race to Build and Survive Superintelligence

“Writing some website actually had no interest to me whatsoever,” he would recall. “Founding a company—those weren’t things that I was interested in at all. I was interested in discovering fundamental scientific truth.”
― Claude St. John, The Scaling Curve: Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the Race to Build and Survive Superintelligence