The AI field has been getting a lot of news lately from some of its biggest names. OpenAI CEO just said that the arrival of an AGI agent of its own might still be a ways off. The same OpenAI and others have been warning US leaders about China’s progress in this area. Now, the Anthropic chief has said that AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” sooner than you think.
Early this year, OpenAI’s Sam Altman wrote a blog post about AGI agents and the company’s plans. He said that these “entities” could be smart enough to join the workforce sometime in 2025, replacing humans. Looking ahead, AGI agents could perform any task in the same way that a human is capable of doing. Now, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has expressed his views regarding advanced AI.
Anthropic chief sees “plausible” that AI will surpass “almost all humans” in the next couple of years
“I don’t know exactly when it’ll come, I don’t know if it’ll be 2027. I think it’s plausible it could be longer than that. I don’t think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything. And then eventually better than all humans at everything, even robotics,” Amodei said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
He also spoke briefly about the potential implications for human workers of AI systems being able to master areas such as 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… at places like this event, about how do we organize our economy, right? How do humans find meaning?” Amodei responded.
Amodei raised concerns about the role of humans once AI and robotics can replace workers in all possible fields. He thinks that when the time comes, we will have to completely rethink the way people view work, themselves, and others.
“We’ve recognized that we’ve reached the point as a technological civilization where the idea, there’s huge abundance and huge economic value, but the idea that the way to distribute that value is for humans to produce economic labor, and this is where they feel their sense of self worth…Once that idea gets invalidated, we’re all going to have to sit down and figure it out,” he said.
Anthropic getting heavy investments from big tech companies
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei—his sister—and five former OpenAI employees founded Anthropic in 2021. Currently, the company’s flagship product is the AI model Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Although it is not the best on the market, it often stands out in AI benchmark lists in different parameters. The firm has just received $1 billion from Google, whose investment now reaches $3 billion. Another company that has put money into Anthropic is Amazon, which has raised $8 billion in the last 18 months. In fact, the upcoming improved Alexa could be powered by Claude AI models.
