SNL Weekend Update: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on A.I.'S Threat to Humanity [video]

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CCharlesW about 3 hours ago 78 commentsRead Article on youtube.com

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Discussion (78 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

tptacek•about 2 hours ago

This is the best thing Jane Wickline has done. I worried about whether she was on the bubble because she's so situational (I think that's a good thing), but clearly she's got staying power.

The_Blade•about 2 hours ago

i just learned her partner is named Henry Hornbuckle now this is power couple we deserve but not the one we need right now

Aboutplants•about 1 hour ago

Her mother also just happens to be Lorne Michaels long term assistant

sippingabonedry•about 2 hours ago

Is this supposed to be funny?

Hard to comprehend how we've gone from Norm MacDonald being so relentlessly bold he was fired, to this sterility, in 30 years.

RachelF•33 minutes ago

Or George Carlin - perhaps it's just me, but modern shows aren't that funny anymore.

swed420•about 1 hour ago

> Hard to comprehend how we've gone from Norm MacDonald being so relentlessly bold he was fired, to this sterility, in 30 years.

Is it, though?

Wouldn't it be more strange if the former didn't eventually lead to the latter?

2III7•about 1 hour ago

Dario?

queenkjuul•about 1 hour ago

30 years is a long ass time. Did you miss what happened to the Simpsons over 30 years?

Chance-Device•about 1 hour ago

Man, the Simpsons stopped being funny a few years in, I have no idea what they’ve even been doing since then.

queenkjuul•about 1 hour ago

"A few years" is like ten, in their case. Homer v New York is like season 9 or 10

But it falls off very quickly after that, that it's still on the air today is elder abuse

Chance-Device•22 minutes ago

This one’s better. The UK delivers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7gPGHx7sYNk&pp=ygUSc25sIHdlZWt...

Chance-Device•about 2 hours ago

It’s not funny. It could be, Dario is idiosyncratic enough they could have done a really good send up of him, this just wasn’t it.

MBCook•about 1 hour ago

Yeah it wasn’t great. Other parts of this week’s Weekend Update were better like the Meta AI character having the same dead eyes as Zuck or Tucker Carlson discussing movies. That wasn’t great but had some fun in pure ridiculousness.

Either way the fact this is even a sketch says a lot about where we are. They clearly think enough people know about this discussion, and him specifically, to be able to pull this off. If you made an SNL sketch about other people HN talks about the audience would just be totally confused and lost.

He has earned the very dubious honor of joining Elizabeth Holmes and Zuckerberg as “weirdo tech people to make fun of”.

troupo•about 2 hours ago

To be honest I struggle to understand why SNL endures. It has never been funny with very very few exceptions.

chews•about 2 hours ago

I urge you to urge me to stop is critical Super Dario

jihadjihad•about 2 hours ago

I know it’s a little OT, but I keep seeing the same misquotation all over the place. Right at the beginning Michael Che refers to the claim that “there’s a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity within 10 years.”

But that isn’t what the often-misquoted current and former Anthropic employees said. They said it was a 10% chance of it happening by the end of the current decade [0], i.e. by 2030, not 2036.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/anthropic...

pj_mukh•about 2 hours ago

But what does it matter? It’s not like that number is based on any science. It’s literally p (doom | vibes).

someothherguyy•about 2 hours ago

what does the scientific literature say then?

pj_mukh•about 1 hour ago

Unfortunately, this question was never asked by any news organization or of Coxon as he ran to the press. People who would usually ask to "see the work" never did because it comfortably confirmed their biases.

Specifically, I have no idea what the research says, or even if it exists, I wish we had a system to figure that out instead of exciting Twitter "whistleblower" threads.

nmca•about 1 hour ago

You are wrong. The confusion arises because Coxon said “within the decade” with no associated probability and Hubinger said “within the next decade” at 10%.

lostmsu•about 1 hour ago

Video unavailable

The uploader has not made this video available in your country

hurfdurf•31 minutes ago

Was expecting it to be US-only, but the list of blocked countries is odd.

Andorra, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Algeria, France, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Comoros (the), Luxembourg, Morocco, Monaco, Martinique, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Réunion, Seychelles, Tunisia, Wallis and Futuna, Mayotte

TheAceOfHearts•about 2 hours ago

I generally don't think SNL is very funny but I think it's quite socially healthy that they make fun of the political and economic elites. I wonder if we mapped out their targets if there would be any glaring omissions that would stand out.

This video didn't make me laugh but I appreciate the flexing of the first amendment. They should continue with other AI-related figures.

rudedogg•about 2 hours ago

Agreed. I wish they would have thrown in a "guardrails to stop me, but mostly my competitors" so the public would think about that possibility more.

charcircuit•about 2 hours ago

I disagree there are so many other ways to be funny than making fun of someone's stuttering. We shouldn't be bullying people delivering trillions of dollars of value to society.

pluto_modadic•about 2 hours ago

the idea of a caricature is to exaggerate the features someone is most insecure about. That's what Spitting Image is.

charcircuit•about 2 hours ago

That is literally bullying. especially when those insecurities are something that can not be fixed. You can't excuse bullying because "it's for humor." It's cruel.

gib444•about 2 hours ago

Her character's voice at times reminds me of that Rick and Morty court room sketch. NSFW. Pretty hilarious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vN_PEmeKb0

MBCook•about 1 hour ago

Seems like a gollum thing to me.

bitwize•about 2 hours ago

When Dario talks to himself sotto voce and then answers himself in a raspy voice, Gollum-like, made me lose it. I once encountered a severely cognitively deficient individual on the bus who calmed himself in the exact same fashion. It's almost a perfectly succinct psychological snapshot of the character they're trying to create.

nullc•about 1 hour ago

They missed an opportunity to talk about 'my precious AI' or have the gollum-like voice talk in claudeisms ('lever', 'honest take', 'load bearing'). I wasn't entirely clear on the skits working theory, is this a crazy guy that thinks he has the one ring but really has a cereal box toy?

MBCook•about 1 hour ago

“My precious” would have been too on the nose for the Gollum part for me.

Claudisms could be fun but probably too obscure for the target audience.

uncivilized•41 minutes ago

I imagine 99% of viewers have never seen Dario speak either.

starkd•about 1 hour ago

How did everyone forget how to be funny? It's like there's a formula that's been patented and hidden away so no one else can find it.

monkaiju•about 1 hour ago

Pretty funny tbh, it is amazing these clowns have so much influence over such large investments...

AtlasBarfed•about 1 hour ago

Hey how about we go back to LLM/AI being a simple knowledge request service? You have a model trained on data, you request a text or media response from that knowledge model.

No agents. And if someone loops the response into an agent, well, then they are legally liable for personally doing that.

dgellow•about 1 hour ago

I’m looking so much forward to the bubble popping and LLM to be seen as a standard software. They were so much more interesting without the whole absurd 14y-old-first-sci-fi hype around them :(

verdverm•about 3 hours ago

I for one am glad to see society moving from deference to skepticism of these valley elite

DonHopkins•about 3 hours ago

It's all just a big scam to scare the public into buying robot insurance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM

BearOso•about 2 hours ago

In reality, it is a big scam to trick the public into thinking AI is dangerous and needs to be regulated. Then the government can limit it so only the preferred companies can continue to develop it.

It's because both frontier companies are worried about plateauing and there's no barrier to competition. They both have upcoming IPOs, too.

pvab3•about 2 hours ago

To be fair, I think most of this is sci-fi brain rot, but the fact that 2 trillion-dollar companies supposedly have RSI as their #1 priority by a long shot is concerning to me

Bluecobra•about 3 hours ago

An insurance policy with a robot plan? Certainly, I’m too old!

layer8•about 2 hours ago

Does it apply when robo-advisors make bad investments?

verdverm•about 3 hours ago

lol, that's good

Lawfare Media recently, actually proposed a mutualize insurance system for Ai

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/bootstrapping-frontier-...

I don't think it such a bad idea that the Big Ai labs put money into a fund for their negligence, but that should not relieve them of criminal liabilities

my consternation is that they likely have sufficient money to avoid consequences, like the sacks and the opioid epidemic, two-tier justice system at it's finest...

iAMkenough•about 3 hours ago

How long until the President of the United States threatens to pull licenses for NBC over their anti-AI viewpoint?

bstsb•about 3 hours ago

it’s alright, they’re making fun of the “security risk” Anthropic’s CEO, not their darling Altman

kanwisher•about 2 hours ago

Trump doesn’t like Dario, he has been invited to White House I guess to make him stop causing drama https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2104238992254222679?s=20

aleksandrm•about 1 hour ago

Why is this on the front page of HN?

GolfPopper•about 1 hour ago

For a while, it has felt like anything LLM-related hits the front page.

gib444•42 minutes ago

Thankfully https://www.unslop.news/ exists!

barbazoo•about 3 hours ago

> The uploader has not made this video available in your country

egeozcan•about 3 hours ago

Here you go: https://www.instagram.com/reels/Ddxyuq4N9vj/ (had the same problem)

sajithdilshan•about 2 hours ago

It's so stupid, like why would they block it on YouTube, but not on instagram. Is the copyright law only applicable in YouTube

vdfs•about 1 hour ago

This a weird SNL thing, the only ones that does geo block on youtube (afaik), their quality is way down so not even worth enabling VPN to watch them

Waterluvian•about 3 hours ago

Copyright might be part of this; I haven’t thought that through. But this restriction is about whose turf they’re trying to push their product on. SNL has to be pushed through a different distributor in different regions.