The CEO of US-based startup Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has published a 15,000-word essay that paints a roadmap for the future of AI’s potential and describes a vision of how the technology could transform society within the next decade.
He believes “most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be” but also follows it up with “just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.”
He founded the research-focused startup, along with Daniela Amodei, which aims to ‘build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.’ Its flagship product is ‘Claude’ which is a family of large language models.
It was first released in March 2023 and has quickly become one of the more popular tools in the AI competition, rivaling the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
One of his first predictions is that powerful AI could come as early as 2026, though he says “there are also ways it could take much longer.”
He describes this next step up as being “an AI model – likely similar to today’s LLM’s in form, though it might be based on a different architecture, might involve several interacting models, and might be trained differently…”
Amodei says this advancement will be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc.”
It could also go beyond being just something users speak to, as it could have “all the ‘interfaces’ available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access.”
Future of AI: More human jobs could be created to complement technology
Looking to the future workforce, the CEO says at one point “our current economic setup” could no longer make sense which would cause a “need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.”
Although the founder acknowledges the potential cons of the emerging technology, like job displacement, he suggests new positions will be created to complement AI.
While that could make some people wince, Amodei suggests it’s not as crazy as it sounds as “the fact is that civilization has successfully navigated major economic shifts in the past: from hunter-gathering to farming, farming to feudalism, and feudalism to industrialism.
“I suspect that some new and stranger thing will be needed, and that it’s something no one today has done a good job of envisioning. It could be as simple as a large universal basic income for everyone, although I suspect that will only be a small part of a solution.
“It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources (huge amounts of them, since the overall economic pie will be gigantic) to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans (based on some judgment ultimately derived from human values).”
Featured Image: AI-generated via Ideogram
