“In 5 years, you’ll have two or three more turns of the crank in these large models.” indicated former Google CEO Eric Schmidt amid reports top AI labs have hit an AI progression roadblock. “These large models are scaling with ability that is unprecedented. There’s no evidence that the scaling laws have begun to stop.”
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seemingly shared the same sentiments, claiming generative AI could surpass human cognitive capabilities “in almost everything” within 2-3 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.
Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei
This news comes amid job security concerns with AI’s rapid progression. Top executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, have recently been spotted highlighting plans to replace the human workforce with AI. Benioff indicated his company is seriously debating hiring new software engineers in 2025, while Zuckerberg foresees a future where mid-level AI engineers claim software engineering jobs from humans at Meta.
According to Anthropic’s CEO:
“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.”
Despite recent claims by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son that AGI is coming very soon during OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate launch, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is seemingly keeping the term at arm’s length (via ArsTechnica), referring to it as a “marketing term” during a separate interview with CNBC. He told the outlet that he prefers to refer to next-gen AI systems as a “country of geniuses in a data center.”
On the other hand, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims that AGI will be achieved sooner than anticipated with current hardware. While Altman is confident OpenAI’s team is well-equipped with the skillset to build AGI, he recently dismissed AGI deployment next month as “Twitter hype” while teasing “very cool stuff.”
Interestingly, the executive claims the safety concerns about AI won’t be experienced at the AGI moment as it will whoosh by with surprisingly little societal impact. Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AGI would be achieved in 2026 or 2027 based on extrapolated curves of the progression of advanced AI models.
