Anthropic Chief Says AI Could Surpass 'Almost All Humans ' Shortly After 2027
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
When you can't sell with the capabilities you have, and promising anything amazing would be a lie, just intimate that you're BASICALLY building Skynet and wait for the love.
The people that push this stuff are crazy on their own fumes.
It sounds so transparently full of hype I really don’t know how people take them seriously.
10 years on from that I don't think what we have now is so shocking.
The main problem is this waive of the hand "..and then AGI".
Who knows, maybe we even find AGI is not as useful as what it seems like it would be right now.
It mostly worries me the way "AGI" has taken on this mythic, modern quest for the holy grail/philosophers stone feel.
Can you?
And efficient machines earn for their owners. Not for the unemployed.
Also, efficiency increases the demand and price of resources. Including land.
This is especially true if there is extreme inequality, meaning a minority are benefiting from the savings and increased leverage from efficiency improvements. Increasing their lifestyles, but more significantly and endlessly, their need to compete harder with each other to maintain the value they have.
That self-reinforcing loop is already in full force. It’s just going to cycle faster.
We don’t tend to question that ever present reality in the wild, when we consider other species and individuals of other species.
For good, or ill, the human condition is about to change radically.
Their problem really is in the present, no one should be buying their dangerously premium productivity boost plans when others will offer intelligence too cheap to meter. Such lack of faith in their own AI to solve future problems kind of exposes the doubt tree about their current path.
None of these Hype AI CEOs are willing to put their money where their mouth is, draw up a contract to sell all your hard assets for their projected cost to replace them in 2028. If so confident your AI can replace human labor for near-free by then what is the worry? Oh no, it won't build a yacht or a house by then... I know.
If you think this is all BS and you will be always smarter than any machine, realize that raw computing power grows by 10^6 every ~25 years. AI seems to follow the same growth.
If you think you are safe, read what Geoffrey Hinton, one of the fathers of ML, said about 10-20% chance of AI leading to human extinction in 30 years. Or read about Sam Altman building his bunker in New Zealand while espousing AI utopia.
If this doesn't give you shivers, enjoy your blissful ignorance.
That is really not true anymore unless there will be a new technology that can do much better than silicon electronics. Doesn't mean that were safe, but it's not that clear.
Edit: to expand, a single transistor is made of a pretty pedestrian number of atoms these days. The gate pitch of TSMC "3 nm" is about 40 nm (not all of which is transistor) and silicon atoms are about 0.2 nm apart. So you have, let's say, 30^3 / 0.2^3 ~= 3 million atoms in a transistor. There is no room for another 10^6 improvement because a transistor with just a few atoms probably wouldn't work, the thermal noise would dominate it. Paraphrasing the famous Feynman quote, there isn't much room at the botton anymore, now.
The end of Moore's Law is here (for now) even with multicores and everything else, by the way. That you can get more compute by throwing more resources at the problem doesn't really count. The big deal about Moore's Law was that it was free. The 3D stuff, clusters, etc, can increase the number of transistors... but it's gonna cost proportionally more in fabrication and energy when running.
Good thing that the number of neurons in our brains are so many orders of magnitude larger than this that it doesn't matter.
I think what you're getting at is that in the next few years we're going to have AGI, which will eventually cause societal collapse. Under that assumption, while all of the AGI arguments are pretty poor, computing power increases over time is one of the weakest. It's going to take so much more than just computing power to get us close to AGI, it's going to take a lot more than LLMs, and it's possible to poison models with specially created data, so I'm not worried; I don't have shivers. What gives me more shivers is that there are people that seriously believe the hype to the degree that they believe the current technology, just a bit improved, will lead to the end of our current life as we know it.
Those 16 billion neurons in the cortex form over 140 TRILLION connections through synapes. Those are both computing elements as well as memory.
There's no comparison, not even close. As a bonus we don't each require a giant warehouse to house us, we don't require a vast supply of water, nor do we require a personal dedicated power plant.
It is hardly impossible there are remote white color workers at 30 right now who have to get a 6am-3pm/3pm-11pm/11pm-6am factory job at 50.
It is such a miserable thought I think the idea of societal collapse is more comforting.
I must have watched the movie Terminator 2 more than 50 times. I know the AI apocalypse very well. Don’t worry about it. If the day comes, we’ll figure it out.
For how many years has this been the trend?
[1] I imagine the same is true for o3. We simply don’t know how to make an AI that actually understands what numbers are in the way that toddlers and pigeons do.
I suspect we'll just let those without the means to guarantee their well-being just die off then.
On the upside probably good for the environment & mitigating against climate change though.
History has some entertaining responses to previous holders of such viewpoints.
Any recommendations on vendors of unhackable robots, a.k.a. computers?
> Amodei also spoke some about the potential implications of highly intelligent AI systems when these AI models can control advanced robotics.
"[If] we make good enough AI systems, they'll enable us to make better robots. And so when that happens, we will need to have a conversation..."
Good luck... I'm sure some altruistic individuals will "hack" things so you don't need to be worried.
For a fictional treatment of this topic, see Jonathan Nolan's Person of Interest, which begins with one supercomputer, but ends with competing supercomputers and their competing human owners in an endless arms race.
The incentives in this scenario are power, not altruism.
That's assuming there are competing humans left and economic gain to be had.
Humans have one or two incentives beyond economics.
> assuming there are competing humans left
Indeed, one possible scenario is zero humans left.
When there's very little economic reason to keep most people around. Then you just need enough force to keep people from taking what is yours and wait it out. No need to hunt anyone down indiscriminately.
Plus, nukes generally have been controlled by governments and mass use of them leaves little left for those in power and a whole lot of work for them.
Modern arsenals include a range of targetable weapons.
Hopefully the "strategies" of would-be predators are not based on AI hallucinations.
It does include this "... then magic happens" speculation:
[If] we make good enough AI systemsNot particularly worried about anyone dying off. At least in mid to rich countries.
Bigger concern in those to me is what sort of existence it’ll be. State keeps you alive sure but I’d like to do a bit more than that
See that us insurance ceo getting shot. Lambo is more fun if you’re not at risk of getting shot
When the mass of people have no economic value to contribute to those in power, then what?
Will they just feed and house those people?
It goes deeper than that. Being surrounding by poor and suffering people sucks. Most people can’t block out that level of suffering and may even feel guilt.
No doubt there are some clinical psychopaths out there to whom that doesn’t apply but I think it’s broadly true.
It’s much easier to block out when people or poor but still sorta ok. So yes I think it’s going towards some sort of UBI. A low and grim UBI but UBI anyway
Homeless gathering tend to be moved to be out of sight.
We (in the U.S.) happily do not care for those whom cannot afford healthcare.
And those currently with their hands on the levers of society have already shown themselves to not act all that altruistically.
No AI company has any sensible answer to what happens when the gradual displacement of knowledge workers accelerates and what exactly these “new jobs” are.
Without them specifying, then the goal of “AGI” was always to raise more money until they get there with the hard deadline of 2030. That is Anthropic’s plan and especially OpenAI’s plan.
Otherwise, why do you think OpenAI is going to release an agentic AI called “Operator” and who do you think they are trying to displace? Why are they (Sam, Zuck, etc) building their bunkers ahead of 2030?
I’m giving you 5 years ahead of their hard deadline of this displacement to prepare for their plan. [0]