16 ms·

Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]

118 points by danielmorozoff 8mo ago

sidewndr46 8mo ago
I am always reminded of this article when the topic of 'the exponential' comes up: https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-the-exponential-again/ https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-...
- co_king_3 8mo ago
  Are they failing to understand, or are they manipulating their audience?
  - viking123 8mo ago
    They are manipulating and fear mongering gullible people, it's their new business model.
    - neom 8mo ago
      I'm friends with one of the Anthropic founders for over 15 years now, and I just find this line of thinking so sad. They are not manipulative fear mongering people, they're actually very decent people who you might consider listening to.
      - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
        If that were true, they wouldn't publish hype results that then turn out to be completely unsubstantiated. Remember the "agents built a web browser"? I can't personally judge your friend as I don't know him. But the company is consistently lying about how good their product is in order to hype it up.
        neom 8mo ago
        I don't talk to said friend about their work, so I genuinely have no insight here, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet what they have internally is considerably disparate from what is currently available in their consumer product.
        viking123 8mo ago
        The stuff they have internally might be slightly better than what they have now lmao. You have to super dense to believe otherwise. Also I don't need the Anthropic ghouls telling me what I can or can not ask their stupid bot. At least Elon doesn't play this sad censorship game where you cannot say "boob" to it without it locking down.
      - viking123 8mo ago
        Yeah and my dad works at Nintendo. If they want us to listen they really need to stop with releasing all the bullshit and over exaggeration what their chat bot does. And stop freaking whining about "MUHHH CHINA". Those ghouls stole almost all the books in the world, I hope China steals all from them and keeps releasing the free models.
        neom 8mo ago
        Well, if your dad isn't one of the founder of Nintendo your point is moot. Given I was on the founding team of digitalocean as head of strategy till the IPO, and one of the founders of anthropic is a former tech journalist who covered my startups, maybe my friend is a founder of Anthropic?! Sorry your dad didn't work anywhere cool tho. :(
        viking123 8mo ago
        Who cares about these journalists. My point is that Amodei is a complete ghoul and loves fear mongering normies and being racist towards Chinese while HIS company stole all the damn books in the world. I hope the Chinese steal all their data and keep doing public models. This guy can't even figure a solution for his balding head let alone making an AGI lmao. But let Anthropic keep tricking midwits along. Elon has 100x the backbone that these fraudsters have btw. For God's sake these guys are selling the doubling of human life span to some desperate elderly investors. Really going for people's deepest fears there. Oh yes just invest in us so you can get double the life span and don't have to die!
        neom 8mo ago
        Alright well I can tell you're grumpy about this so how about we agree to disagree? I don't know Dario so I couldn't say, but I do trust Jack a lot. That aside: this is the 3rd time I've heard the racist towards Chinese thing, what exactly is that all about if you'd be willing to save me a google?
- integricho 8mo ago
  Written by an anthropic employee, I mean how seriously can you take that piece? pure hype
  - neom 8mo ago
    I think it's coupled differential equations where each growth factor amplifies the others, I posted about it in 2024 - https://b.h4x.zip/ce/ https://b.h4x.zip/ce/ - sent it around a bit but everyone thought I was nuts, look at that post from 2025 and think about what was happening IRL under the graphs line, then go look at where METR is today. I'm not trying to brag, I don't work for anthropic, but I do think I'm probably right.
    - munksbeer 8mo ago
      Access blocked, suspicious site.
      - neom 8mo ago
        Firewall blocking it? Weird, dns is all fine.
  - sidewndr46 8mo ago
    I only take it partially seriously. I view it as a serious presentation that is misinformed. What I find unique is that people have become so interested in "the exponential" it's almost become like an axiom, or even a near religious belief in AI. It is a subtle admission that while current AI capabilities are impressive, it requires additional years of exponential growth for AI to reach the fantastic claims some people are making. All glory to the exponential!
- moregrist 8mo ago
  This is written with the idea that the exponential part keeps going forever. It never does. The progress curve always looks sigmoidal. - The beginning looks like a hockey stick, and people get excited. The assumption is that the growth party will never stop. - You start to hit something that inherently limits the exponential growth and growth starts to be linear. It still kinda looks exponential and the people that want the party to keep growing will keep the hype up. - Eventually you saturate something and the curve turns over. At this point it’s obvious to all but the most dedicated party-goers. I don’t know where we are on the LLM curve, but I would guess we’re in the linear part. Which might keep going for a while. Or maybe it turns over this year. No one knows. But the party won’t go on forever; it never does. I think Cal Newport’s piece [0] is far more realistic: > But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. [0] Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505735
- PollardsRho 8mo ago
  > Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. This is the part I find very strange. Let's table the problems with METR [1], just noting that benchmarking AI is extremely hard and METR's methodology is not gospel just because METR's "sole purpose is to study AI capabilities". (That is not a good way to evaluate research!) Taking whatever idealized metric you want, at some point it has to level off. That's almost trivially true: everyone should agree that unrestricted exponential growth forever is impossible, if only for the eventual heat death of the universe. That makes the question when, and not if. When do external forces dominate whatever positive feedback loops were causing the original growth? In AI, those positive feedback loops include increased funding, increased research attention and human capital, increased focus on AI-friendly hardware, and many others, including perhaps some small element of AI itself assisting the research process that could become more relevant in the future. These positive feedback loops have happened many times, and they often do experience quite sharp level-offs as some external factor kicks in. Commercial aircraft speeds experienced a very sharp increase until they leveled off. Many companies grow very rapidly at first and then level off. Pandemics grow exponentially at first before revealing their logistic behavior. Scientific progress often follows a similar trajectory: a promising field emerges, significant increased attention brings a bevy of discoveries, and as the low-hanging fruit is picked the cost of additional breakthroughs surges and whatever fundamental limitations the approach has reveal themselves. It's not "extremely surprising" that COVID did not infect a trillion people, even though there are some extremely sharp exponentials you can find looking at the first spread in new areas. It isn't extremely surprising that I don't book flights at Mach 3, or that Moore's Law was not an ironclad law of the universe. Does that mean the entire field will stop making any sort of progress? Of course not. But any analysis that fundamentally boils down to taking a (deeply flawed) graph and drawing a line through it and simplifying the whole field of AI research to "line go up" is not going to give you well-founded predictions for the future. A much more fruitful line of analysis, in my view, is to focus on the actual conditions and build a reasonable model of AI progress that includes current data while building in estimations of sigmoidal behavior. Does training scaling continue forever? Probably not, given the problems with e.g., GPT-4.5 and the limited amount of quality non-synthetic training data. It's reasonable to expect synthetic training data to work better over time, and it's also reasonable to expect the next generation of hardware to also enable an additional couple orders of magnitude. Beyond that, especially if the money runs out, it seems like scaling will hit a pretty hard wall barring exceptional progress. Is inference hardware going to get better enough that drastically increased token outputs and parallelism won't matter? Probably not, but you can definitely forecast continued hardware improvements to some degree. What might a new architectural paradigm be for AI, and would that have significant improvements over current methodology? To what degree is existing AI deployment increasing the amount of useful data for AI training? What parts of the AI improvement cycle rely on real-world tasks that might fundamentally limit progress? That's what the discussion should be, not reposting METR for the millionth time and saying "line go up" the way people do about Bitcoin. [1] https://www.transformernews.ai/p/against-the-metr-graph-coding-capabilities-software-jobs-task-ai https://www.transformernews.ai/p/against-the-metr-graph-codi...
- bendbro 8mo ago
  tl;dr The best ~AI's~ LLM's slop asymptote is 10 hours. Restated, if you let the best LLM chomp on a task for 10 hours, the output becomes slop. * These tasks are of the type that you spend 1% of your SWE career working on. * Each task is primed with an essay length prompt. * You must play needle in the haystack for bugs in 10 hours worth of AI generated slop. My experience trying AI coding at work and my observations of AI evangelists makes me believe AI coding is exclusively the purview of people who willing to handhold an AI at half pace to achieve the same result while working on software which amounts to greenfield/toy problems. The danger of LLMs to thought work is enormously overstated and intentionally overhyped. AI : StackOverflow :: StackOverflow : graybeard in basement It would be cool if AI kills all thought work, but what will actually happen is a undersupply of SWEs and a second golden age of SWE salaries in like 15y. https://github.com/METR/public-tasks/tree/main https://github.com/METR/public-tasks/tree/main
co_king_3 8mo ago
[flagged]
- observationist 8mo ago
  Are you talking about Dario, or Dwarkesh? Dario is a true believer. He thinks he's right. There's no scam or deception happening there. The outcome, however, is the same as if he were, unfortunately. Dwarkesh is a wonderful, phenomenal human, and we're lucky to have him.
  - co_king_3 8mo ago
    ...
  - rvz 8mo ago
    > There's no scam or deception happening there. Oh sweet summer child.
    - uejfiweun 8mo ago
      Care to actually explain rather than post reddit-tier snark?
      - rvz 8mo ago
        It is purely psychological. He is selling fear through scaremongering about safety when that is just a marketing scapegoat for everyone to continue buying more tokens to use Claude. Why do you think he continues to scare-monger about open weight models?
        uejfiweun 8mo ago
        Hmm. So you're saying that he's intentionally overhyping the danger of ML models in a cynical play to eliminate open models through regulation or backlash, when in reality there is no danger. But if this is the case why isn't Altman and Demis saying the same?
GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
Does anyone know who Dwarkesh’s patron is that boosted him in podcast world? He isn’t otherwise highly distinguished and admitted does his show prep with AI which sometimes shows in his questions. I feel like there are a very large number of tech podcasts, but there’s some marketing effect around this guy that I just don’t understand.
- co_king_3 8mo ago
  Who's he doing the interview with?
  - schmidtleonard 8mo ago
    Exactly, it's the Lex Fridman gambit: a reputation for asking safe questions to powerful people tends to snowball because "safe, popular interview platform" is something they are all looking to self-promote on. If you want to see the mask slip, watch Lex's interview with Zelensky.
    - HDThoreaun 8mo ago
      Friedman's Zelensky interview was terrible but I think that has more to do with him being a russian nationalist than a bad podcast host
- jstummbillig 8mo ago
  If you think there are as or more interesting podcasts out there, feel free to name them.
  - moralestapia 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 8mo ago
      Please don't do this here.
seydor 8mo ago
We ll need a new word after 'genius'
jaredcwhite 8mo ago
"Nobody disagrees we'll achieve AGI this century." Citation needed please.
- dude250711 8mo ago
  Nobody in their little bubble.
- ponector 8mo ago
  It's easy to say as almost no one of working age is going to live to the end of the century. Also the same as with saying that "nuclear fussion unlimited energy is 20 years away"
deathanatos 8mo ago
> Nobody at this point disagrees we’re going to achieve AGI this century. Nobody. Nobody disagrees, there is zero disagreement, there is no war in Ba Sing Se. > 100% of today’s SWE tasks are done by the models. Thank God, maybe I can go lie in the sun then instead of having to solve everyone's problems with ancient tech that I wonder why humanity is even still using. Oh, no? I'm still untying corporate Gordian knots? > There is no reason why a developer at a large enterprise should not be adopting Claude Code as quickly as an individual developer or developer at a startup. My company tried this, then quickly stopped: $$$
- coffeefirst 8mo ago
  I’m honestly trying to understand the state of the art and unfortunately the industry is so grifty it’s hard to tell… Can I ask what happened with your Claude Code rollout?
- stego-tech 8mo ago
  > Nobody disagrees, there is zero disagreement, there is no war in Ba Sing Se. This captures my chief irk over these sorts of "interviews" and AI boosterism quite nicely. Assume they're being 100% honest that they genuinely believe nobody disagrees with their statement. That leaves one of two possible outcomes: 1) They have not ingested data from beyond their narrow echo chamber that could challenge their perceptions, revealing an irresponsible, nay, negligent amount of ignorance for people in positions of authority or power OR 2) They do not see their opponents as people. Like, that's it. They're either ignorant or they view their opposition as subhuman. There is no gray area here, and it's why I get riled up when they're allowed to speak unchallenged at length like this. Genuinely good ideas don't need this much defense, and genuinely useful technologies don't need to be forced down throats.
  - co_king_3 8mo ago
    > They do not see their opponents as people. You hit the nail on their head. They go out of their way to call you an "AI bot" if you say something that contradicts their delusional world view.
taco_emoji 8mo ago
thanks for the autoplay audio crap
theideaofcoffee 8mo ago
> end of the exponential. Oh good, hopefully it'll model itself after an exponential rise in any sort of animal populations and collapse on itself because it can no longer be sustained! Isn't that how things go in exponential systems with resource constraints? We can only hope that will be the best outcome. That would be wonderful.
supergilbert 8mo ago
I find myself coding a lot with Claude Code.. but then it's very hard to quantify the productivity boost. The first 80% seem magical, the last ones are painful. I have to basically get the mental model of the codebase in my head no matter what.
- co_king_3 8mo ago
  This is my experience, which is why I stopped altogether. I think I'm better off developing a broad knowledge of design patterns and learning the codebases I work with in intricate, painstaking detail as opposed to trying to "go fast" with LLMs.
  - le-mark 8mo ago
    I agree and to address this I’ve tried using them to understand large code bases, I haven’t worked out how to prompt this effectively yet. Has anyone gone this route?
  - GoatInGrey 8mo ago
    It's the evergreen tradeoff between the short and long terms. Do I get the nugget of information I need right now but lose in a month, or do I spend the time and energy that leads to deeper understanding and years-long retention of the knowledge? There is something about our biology that makes us learn better when we struggle. There are many concepts on this dynamic: generation effect, testing effect, spacing effect, desirable difficulties, productive failure...it all converges on the same phenomenon where the easier it is to learn, the worse we learn. Take K-12 for instance. As computing technology is further and further integrated into education, cognitive performance decreases in a near-linear relationship. Gen Z is famously the first generation to perform worse in every cognitive measure than previous generations, for as long as we've been recording since the 19th century. An uncomfortable truth emerging from studies on electronics usage in schools is that it isn't just the phones driving this. It's more so the Duolingo effect of software overall emulating the sensation of learning without actually changing the brain state. Because the software that actually challenges you is not as engaging or enjoyable. How you learn, and your ability to parse, infer, and derive meaning from large bodies of information, is increasingly a differentiator in both the personal and professional worlds. It's even more so the case when many of your peers are now learning through LLM-generated summaries averaging just 300 words, perhaps skimming outputs around 1,000 words in length for "important information". The immediate benefits are obvious, but the cost of outsourcing that cognitive work gets lost in the convenience. Because remember, this isn't just about your ability to recall specific regex, follow a syntax convention, or how much code you ship in an hour. Your brain needs exercise, and deep learning is one of the most reliable ways to get it. Doubly true if you're not even writing your own class names. What I am speaking to is not far away or hypothetical, either. Because as of 2023, one in four young adults in the United States is functionally illiterate. https://www.the74million.org/article/many-young-adults-barely-literate-yet-earned-a-high-school-diploma/ https://www.the74million.org/article/many-young-adults-barel...
almostdeadguy 8mo ago
Is no one disturbed by this? At the rate this seems to be happening its going to cause massive disruptions to society and endanger a lot of people.
- co_king_3 8mo ago
  If you're disturbed by this your comment gets flagged and removed by Anthropic astroturfers.
- lkbm 8mo ago
  Uh...there's constant talk from people being disturbed by it. One of the Democratic candidates in 2020 had his platform based around this, and I can assure you that it's not gotten less attention since ChatGPT came out.
- coffeefirst 8mo ago
  That’s the point. AI marketing is dystopian. They describe a world where most people are suddenly starving and homeless, and just when you start to think “hey this sounds like the conditions to create something like a French Revolution but where Bastille is a data center” they pivot to BUY MY PRODUCT SO YOU DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. It’s advertising straight through the amygdala. I have no idea if they actually believe this. But it’s repulsive behavior.
  - almostdeadguy 8mo ago
    I'm legitimately terrified by these people, and seriously worried now that this is not just hype and that they truly don't care about what will happen. And that they may use these models to insulate themselves from the consequences when that time comes. The fact that Nick Land has taken hold as a philosopher in some circles in Silicon Valley truly scares me: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-faith-of-nick-land/ https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-faith-of-nick-land/
    - gom_jabbar 8mo ago
      Nick Land is arguably the most influential philosopher in SV (at least over the past 3 years). Marc Andreessen's acknowledgment of Land in his 2023 The Techno-Optimist Manifesto has brought his underground influence more to the surface. Land's explicit anti-humanism can be repulsive to some on first encounter, but some of his ideas -- e.g. about the identity of capitalism and AI, the autonomization of capital, the technological singularity as capitalism's inherent teleology -- are interesting and can provide a very unique perspective. It's also important to note that he tends to resonate more with creative types. Historically, these were mostly artists. Today, they are also founders (who are psychometrically similar to artists at the population level).
atomic128 8mo ago
Anthropic's interests are not aligned with the interests of the human species. Quoting the Anthropic safety guy who just exited, making a bizarre and financially detrimental move: "the world is in peril" (https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/02/09/anthropic-ai-safety-researcher-warns-of-world-in-peril-in-resignation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/02/09/anthropi...) There are people in the AI industry who are urgently warning you. Myself and my colleagues, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_seek_to_poison/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see... Regulation will not stop this. It's time to build and deploy weapons if you want your species to survive. See earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964545
- rishabhaiover 8mo ago
  Calm down, hysteria doesn't serve any side well.
  - atomic128 8mo ago
    Geoffrey Hinton's assessment of the situation may sound hysterical to you but we have come to believe that he is largely correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton). Hinton understands the dire nature of the threat but overestimates the value of regulation in a world where the threatening technology is under development world-wide. We think regulation is basically impotent and large-scale information weapons are more viable as a solution. This is not the time to be a docile onlooker and we urge you to take action.
    - UltraSane 8mo ago
      LLMs will have to improve drastically before I take these hysterical warning seriously.
  - rramadass 8mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47014519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47014519
dude250711 8mo ago
I think there is a parallel universe where tools like Claud Code actually truly work as advertised but I am not allowed into it... Yet news and opinions from that world somehow seep through into my reality...
- co_king_3 8mo ago
  They probably have the ability to give executives higher quality/more expensive models in the backend.
readitalready 8mo ago
LLMs alone aren't the way to AGI. Perhaps something involving a merge of diffusion or other models that are based on more sensory elements, like images, time, and motion, but LLMs alone aren't going to get us there. The end of the exponential means the start of other models.
- rishabhaiover 8mo ago
  > LLMs alone aren't the way to AGI Pretraining + RL works, there is no clear evidence that it doesn't scale further.
  - readitalready 8mo ago
    Pretraining + RL itself is the scaling limit. If you feed it the entire dataset before 1905, LLMs aren't going to come up with general relativity. It has no concept of physics, or time even. AGI happens when you DON'T need to scale pertaining + RL.
    - acuozzo 8mo ago
      > If you feed it the entire dataset before 1905, LLMs aren't going to come up with general relativity. Link?
      - Jensson 8mo ago
        You don't need a source for that, an LLM with such little data is barely able to form proper sentences.
        acuozzo 8mo ago
        > an LLM with such little data There is a mountain of data pre-1905. Certainly enough to train a decent 30B parameter model. Now, digitizing & OCRing all of that data... THAT is a challenge.
    - rishabhaiover 8mo ago
lancebeet 8mo ago
Is "the end of the exponential" an established expression? There's no singularity in an exponential so the expression doesn't make sense to me. To me, it sounds like "the end of the exponential part", meaning it's a sigmoid, but that's obviously not what he means.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- incrudible 8mo ago
  Why should it be obvious that this is not what he means? I struggle to think how he could mean anything else.
  - lancebeet 8mo ago
    Well, he says >To me, it is absolutely wild that you have people — within the bubble and outside the bubble — talking about the same tired, old hot-button political issues, when we are near the end of the exponential. My interpretation is "It's pointless to discuss the old political issues, because they're not going to be relevant once AGI is achieved". So if he does believe in a plateau, it either contradicts his other prediction (that AGI will be reached in a year or two), or he believes it will plateau after AGI is already reached, which means it's kind of a pointless statement. The important thing w.r.t. all our problems being solved would the advent of AGI, not the plateau.
    - tylervigen 8mo ago
      I think he believe in a plateau on the y axis instead of the x axis… which is AGI.
      - basket_horse 8mo ago
        I took the “end” to mean the part of the exponential where it quickly trends towards infinity. So let’s say the x axis is time (by which you get more training data and more compute) and the y axis is model ability. So far, if we think we are in the beginning of the exponential, adding data/compute looks almost linear to the untrained eye in terms of model capability. But once you hit a threshold, where he thinks the model will start to generalize, a small amount of data/compute will result in a massive increase in model ability.
alephnerd 8mo ago
[flagged]
- Philpax 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - co_king_3 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - alephnerd 8mo ago
    How? I think both Lex Friedman and Dwarkesh Patel provide little substance and only sizzle.
    - RobertBobert 8mo ago
      [dead]
  - phainopepla2 8mo ago
    Which part is racist exactly?
- DarkCrusader2 8mo ago
  I highly doubt that. "The algorithm" will surely adjust the recommendations per geography. I don't think most westerners are getting T-Series recommendation in their feed as well. > He's an Indian Lex Friedman (and I mean that derogatorily) I might be reading this wrong, but sounds kinda racist to me?
  - preuceian 8mo ago
    The insult is that hes similar to Lex Fridman, not that hes Indian.
- GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
  I could see a cynical media mogul seeing that market as a box that needs to be checked. I wonder who makes those decisions, though. Spotify?
crossbody 8mo ago
The concept of the "end of the exponential" sounds like a tech version of Fukuyama's much mocked "End of History". Amodei seems to think we’ll solve all the "useful" problems and then hit a ceiling of utility. But if you’ve read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Amodei’s view looks like a mistake. Knowledge creation is unbounded. Solving diseases/coding shouldn't result in a plateau, but rather unlock totally new, "better" problems we can't even conceive of yet. It's the begining of Inifinity, no end in sight!
- skybrian 8mo ago
  Haven't watched the video, but the end of exponential growth isn't the end of growth. It means the percentage growth per year decreases. The Internet also went through an exponential growth phase at the beginning.
  - trhway 8mo ago
    >the end of exponential growth we're on the verge of getting to Moon and Mars in more than rare tourist numbers and with notable payloads. Add to that advancements in robotics, which will change things here on Earth as well as in space. The growth is only starting. >The Internet also went through an exponential growth phase at the beginning. If we consider general Internet as all the devices connected i think the exponential growth is still on as for example ARM CPUs shipments: 2002: Passed 1 billion cumulative chips shipped. 2011: Surpassed 1 billion units shipped in a single year. 2015: Running at ~12 billion units per year. 2020 (Q4): Record 6.7 billion chips shipped in one quarter (842 chips per second). 2020: Total cumulative shipments crossed 150 billion. 2024 (FY): Nearly 29 billion ARM chips shipped in 12 months. 2025: Total cumulative shipments exceeded 250 billion.
    - skybrian 8mo ago
      I was thinking about user traffic, but sure, it depends what you look at.
    - refulgentis 8mo ago
      > we're on the verge of getting to Moon and Mars in more than rare tourist numbers Cross-country full-self driving, too
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
viking123 8mo ago
I have said that Amodei is by far worse than Sam Altman. Altman wants money but this guy wants the money AND to be your dad by censoring the shit out of the model and wagging his finger at you what you can say or what you cannot. And lobbying for legislation to block competition. Also the constant "muh china" whining while these guys stole all the books in the world. Every time I read something from Dario, it seems like he is grifting normies and other midwits with his "OHHH MY GOD CLAUDE WAS KILLING TO KILL SOMEONE! MY GOD IT WANTS TO BREAK OUT!" Then they have all their Claude constitution bullshit and other nonsense to fool idiots. Yeah bro the model with static weights is truly going to take over. He knows what he is doing, it's all marketing and they have put shit ton of money into it if you have been following the media for the last few months. Btw, it wasn't many months ago that this guy was hawking doubling of human life span at a group of some boomer investors. Oh yeah I wonder why he decided to bring it up there? Maybe because the audience is old and desperate and that scammers play on this weaknesses. Truly of one of the more obnoxious people in the AI space and frankly by extension Anthropic is scammy too. I rather pay Altman than give these guys a penny and that says a lot.
- tedsanders 8mo ago
  Amodei isn't a grifter; the difference is that he really believes powerful AI is imminent. If you truly believe powerful AI is imminent, then it makes perfect sense to be worried about alignment failures. If a powerless 5 year old human mewls they're going to kill someone, we don't go ballistic because we know they have many years to grow up. But if a powerless 5 year old alien says they're going to kill someone, and in one year they'll be a powerful demigod, then it's quite logical to be extremely concerned about the currently harmless thoughts, because soon they could be quite harmful. I myself don't think powerful AI is 1-2 years away, but I do take Amodei and others as genuine, and I think what they're saying does make logical sense if you believe powerful AI is imminent.
  - hackable_sand 8mo ago
    The veil is shifting He will get more violent with his rhetoric
  - 8mo ago
knivets 8mo ago
The closer the bubble to popping the more desperate these people sound. > 100% of today’s SWE tasks are done by the models. Maybe that’s why the software is so shitty nowadays.
- ponector 8mo ago
  This and popular trend to layoff whole QA department.
  - le-mark 8mo ago
    That’s been a trope long before AI. QA coverage has always been cyclical in my experience. In good times there is hiring and QA. Lean times QA is the first to go.
- cxvwK 8mo ago
  Correct. Trust me if they felt really confident the thing they are working on would up-end society, these jokers would go full steam ahead and not tell you anything. This experiment is going to fail. I only hope SWEs finally grab their balls and accept the social contract has been fundamentally broken and that they should not treat their employers so kindly next time.
- JohnnyMarcone 8mo ago
  > 100% of today’s SWE tasks are done by the models. I do think he was overstating the current state of the models by a bit, but this is taken out of context. He is not saying this is where the models are at today. He gives a spectrum [18:30] of the models taking over the SWE jobs: - Model writes 90% of code (today) - Model writes 100% of code - Model does 90% of today's SWE tasks (end-to-end) - Model does 100% of today's SWE tasks - The SWE job creates new tasks that didn't exist before - Model does the new SWE tasks as well (90% reduction in demand for SWE)
bakibab 8mo ago
One of my friends and I started building a PaaS for a niche tech stack, believing that we could use Claude for all sorts of code generation activities. We thought, if Anthropic and OpenAI are claiming that most of the code is written by LLMs in new product launches, we could start using it too. Unsurprisingly, we were able to build a demo platform within a few days. But when we started building the actual platform, we realized that the code generated by Claude is hard to extend, and a lot of replanning and reworking needs to be done every time you try to add a major feature. This brought our confidence level down. We still want to believe that Claude will help in generating code. But I no longer believe that Claude will be able to write complex software on its own. Now we are treating Claude as a junior person on the team and give it well-defined, specific tasks to complete.
- epolanski 8mo ago
  I don't think this is much of a problem with the tools rather than with your approach. We have successfully put Claude in huge multi-thousands pr long with projects. But this meant that: 1. Solid architectural and design decisions were made already after much trial and error 2. They were further refined and refactored 3. Countless hours have been spent in documenting, writing proper skills and architectural and best practice documents Only then Claude started paying off, and even then it's an iterative process where you need to understand why it tries to hack his way out, etc, what to check, what to supervise. Seriously if you think you can just Claude create some project.. Just fork an existing one that does some larger % of what you need and spend most of the initial time scaffolding it to be ai friendly. Also, you need to invest in harnessing, giving tools and ways to the LLM to not go off rails. Strongly typed languages, plenty of compilation and diagnostics tools, access to debuggers or browser mcps, etc. It's not impossible, but you need to approach it with an experimentation approach, not drinking Kool aid.
  - cxvwK 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - mythrwy 8mo ago
    I guess I'd rather just complete one tiny part at a time with Claude and understand the output then do all that. It seems like less effort and infrastructure. And a lot more certain in outcome.
holtkam2 8mo ago
No matter how fast and accurately your AI apps can spit out code (or PowerPoints, or excel spreadsheets, or business plans, etc) you will still need humans to understand how stuff works. If it’s truly business critical software, you can’t get around the fact that humans need to deeply understand how and why it works, in case something goes wrong and they need to explain to the CEO what happened. Even in a world where the software is 100% written by AI in 1 millisecond by a country of geniuses in a data center, humans still need to have their hands firmly on the wheel if they won’t want to risk their businesses well being. That means taking the time to understand what the AI put together. That will be the bottleneck regardless of how fast and smart AI is. Because unless the CEO wants to be held accountable for what the AI builds and deploys, humans will need to be there to take the responsibility for its output.
- nemo1618 8mo ago
  > humans still need to have their hands firmly on the wheel if they won’t want to risk their businesses well being What happens when businesses run by AIs outperform businesses run by humans?
  - entech 8mo ago
    The humans will still own the business (unless you are proposing some alternative version of AI ownership), so in effect there will be always a human who is concerned about their business’s well being. I doubt that we would get into a world where a company would be allowed to run without human involvement (AI directors and AI management) as you will have nobody to hold accountable.
    - KellyCriterion 8mo ago
      Well, wasnt this what are all these blockchain DAO entites where supposed for? :D
      - gom_jabbar 8mo ago
        Yes, I was just about to bring this up as well. One could argue that they were simply too early. It will be interesting to watch things like ERC-8004.
reducesuffering 8mo ago
It's difficult to understate how wrong HN has been on AI since the founding of OpenAI and how consistently right Dario and AI X-riskers have been.
- nemo1618 8mo ago
  I think it's a combination of a) reflexive dislike of any hyped-up tech, mainly due to the crypto era, and b) subconscious ego protection ("this can't be legit, otherwise everything I've built my identity around will be thrown into question"). The best models already produce better code than a significant fraction of human programmers, while also being orders of magnitude faster and cheaper. And the trendlines are stark. Sure, maybe AI can't replace you today. Maybe it will hit that "wall" people are always forecasting, just before it gets good enough to threaten your job. But that's a rather uncomfortable proposition to bet a career on.
surgical_fire 8mo ago
Eat meat, said the butcher
polotics 8mo ago
Referring to a curve with a derivative everywhere equal to its value as something that has an end gives the game away: pure fanciful nominalization with no grounding in any kind of concrete modelling of any constraints. IMHO this is really silly: we already know that IQ is useful as a metric in the 0 to about 130 range. For any value above the delta fails to provide predictive power on real-world metrics. Just this simple fact makes the verbiage here moot. Also let's consider the wattage involved...
Davidzheng 8mo ago
It's difficult for me to express this view, which I hold genuinely, without reading as lacking in humanity. However, I think it would be disastrous for humanity as a whole if we eliminate disease completely. To fight against it and to make progress in that fight is of course deeply human. And we are all affected emotionally and personally by disease of all forms. But if we win the fight against disease, I am almost sure that the human race will just end as a (long term) consequence.
- nathan_douglas 8mo ago
  Could you elaborate? How do you see this playing out? Is this unique to disease or do you believe it's also true of other forms of suffering, e.g. poverty?
  - Davidzheng 8mo ago
    Well I think anything which gives humans unbounded lifespans is probably going end human civilization long term. So I don't think eliminating poverty is dangerous in a similar way no.
    - nathan_douglas 8mo ago
      Because of resource exhaustion or a spiritual crisis or something else/something in addition?
AIorNot 8mo ago
Its Dario's job to hype the product and he hypes the product to get the billons they need- a bit more engineering focused than Altman, but no fundamental difference. A large language model like GPT runs in what you’d call a forward pass. You give it tokens, it pushes them through a giant neural network once, and it predicts the next token. No weights change. Just matrix multiplications and nonlinearities. So at inference time, it does not “learn” in the training sense we need some kind of new architecture to get to next gen wow stuff e.g differentiable memory systems. ie instead of modifying weights, the model writes to a structured memory that is itself part of the computation graph. More dynamic or modular architectures not bigger scalling and spending all our money on data centers anybody in the ML community have an answer for this? (besides better RL and RHLF and World Models)
- kubb 8mo ago
  Yes, 100% this. But it won’t get funded. Everything will get eaten up by the impressive LLM dead end.
- senordevnyc 8mo ago
  They talk about this at length in the interview
- menaerus 8mo ago
  > So at inference time, it does not “learn” in the training sense It learns because it remembers the context. The larger the context, the better the capabilities of the model are. I mean just give it a try and see for yourself - start building a feature, then next feature, then the next one etc. Do it in the same "workspace" or "session" and after few days, one or two weeks of writing code with the agent, you will notice that it somehow magically remembers the stuff and builds upon that context. It becomes slower too. "Re-learning" is something different and it may not be even needed.
thadk 8mo ago
"We're not perfectly good at preventing some of these other [model] companies from using our models internally." — well maybe this says something about how Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 have the same SWE bench score.
- refulgentis 8mo ago
  Also explains why GLM 4.x+ and 5 always think they're Claude. Gives me a smile but, not cool.
dwohnitmok 8mo ago
This is an extremely confusing snippet from the interview for Patel to put as the title. Amodei does not mean that things are plateauing (i.e. the exponential will no longer hold), but rather uses "end" closer to the notion of "endgame," that is we are getting to the point where all benchmarks pegged to human ability will be saturated and the AI systems will be better than any human at any cognitive task. Amodei lays this out here: > [with regards to] the “country of geniuses in a data center”. My picture for that, if you made me guess, is one to two years, maybe one to three years. It’s really hard to tell. I have a strong view—99%, 95%—that all this will happen in 10 years. I think that’s just a super safe bet. I have a hunch—this is more like a 50/50 thing—that it’s going to be more like one to two [years], maybe more like one to three. This is why Amodei opens with > What has been the most surprising thing is the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential. To me, it is absolutely wild that you have people — within the bubble and outside the bubble — talking about the same tired, old hot-button political issues, when we are near the end of the exponential. Whether you agree with him is of course a different matter altogether, but a clearer phrasing would probably be "We are near the endgame."
- rramadass 8mo ago
  Nicely articulated and thanks for pointing this out. It is a 2+hrs video and hence a summary of main themes is welcome.
- adrian_b 8mo ago
  Regarding "AI systems will be better than any human at any cognitive task", while I believe that this may become possible in a distant future, with systems having a quite different structure, I do not see any evidence of such a thing becoming possible during the next decade or two. Nothing that I have seen described here on HN or elsewhere, by the most enthusiast users of AI, who claim that their own productivity has been multiplied, does not demonstrate performance in cognitive tasks even remotely comparable with that of a competent human, much less better performance. All that I see is that the AI systems outperform humans for various tasks only because they had access in their training data to much more information than most humans are allowed to access, because they do not have enough money to obtain such access, both because the various copyright paywalls and also because of the actual cost of storage and retrieval systems. Using an AI agent may be faster than if you were given access to the training data and you would use conventional search tools on it, but the speed may be illusory, because when I search something and I have access to the original sources I can validate the search results faster and with much more certainty than when I try to ponder about the correctness of what AI has provided, e.g. whether a program produced by it really does what I have requested and it is bug free (in comparison with having access to its training programs and being able to choose myself what to copy and paste). I hope that paid access to AI tools gives better results, but the AI replies that popular search engines, like Google and Bing, force upon their users have made Internet searches much worse not better, as their answers always contain something else than I want, and this is in the best case, when the answers are not plainly wrong.
sudohalt 8mo ago
I feel there is an elephant in the room not being discussed. Why does he care about "diffusion of the model" within the economy? If he truly believes there will be the development of a data center of geniuses wouldn't that imply complete market capture. Who cares if pharmaceutical companies or any other business is slow to adopt the AI, the AI will capture that market entirely making those companies obsolete. An API model wouldn't even make sense in this scenario because why would you sell your model when you can capture the entire economy of the business using your model.
- menaerus 8mo ago
  > Who cares if pharmaceutical companies or any other business is slow to adopt the AI, the AI will capture that market entirely making those companies obsolete It wouldn't because of things which are not of a technical nature. Trials for instance might take much longer than developing the drug. Or complying with whatever regulations of given industry which normally requires some heavy-lifting process which is normally run by humans.
  - sudohalt 8mo ago
    In those cases the AI can spin up a shell corp and run the clinical trials, humans would administer the trials (maybe robots can do it). There is already hundreds of pharmaceutical companies so it isn’t difficult for an AI to spin up another and bring in humans when needed
nylonstrung 8mo ago
Dario is a serial bullshitter and one of the least reliable in the industry when it comes to his predictions. Anthropic is doing good work but he's personally responsible for a good deal of the Irrational Exuberance that plagues the space

118 points by danielmorozoff 8mo ago

I am always reminded of this article when the topic of 'the exponential' comes up: https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-the-exponential-again/ https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-...

co_king_3 8mo ago
Are they failing to understand, or are they manipulating their audience?
- viking123 8mo ago
  They are manipulating and fear mongering gullible people, it's their new business model.
  - neom 8mo ago
    I'm friends with one of the Anthropic founders for over 15 years now, and I just find this line of thinking so sad. They are not manipulative fear mongering people, they're actually very decent people who you might consider listening to.
    - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
      If that were true, they wouldn't publish hype results that then turn out to be completely unsubstantiated. Remember the "agents built a web browser"? I can't personally judge your friend as I don't know him. But the company is consistently lying about how good their product is in order to hype it up.
      - neom 8mo ago
        I don't talk to said friend about their work, so I genuinely have no insight here, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet what they have internally is considerably disparate from what is currently available in their consumer product.
        viking123 8mo ago
        The stuff they have internally might be slightly better than what they have now lmao. You have to super dense to believe otherwise. Also I don't need the Anthropic ghouls telling me what I can or can not ask their stupid bot. At least Elon doesn't play this sad censorship game where you cannot say "boob" to it without it locking down.
    - viking123 8mo ago
      Yeah and my dad works at Nintendo. If they want us to listen they really need to stop with releasing all the bullshit and over exaggeration what their chat bot does. And stop freaking whining about "MUHHH CHINA". Those ghouls stole almost all the books in the world, I hope China steals all from them and keeps releasing the free models.
      - neom 8mo ago
        Well, if your dad isn't one of the founder of Nintendo your point is moot. Given I was on the founding team of digitalocean as head of strategy till the IPO, and one of the founders of anthropic is a former tech journalist who covered my startups, maybe my friend is a founder of Anthropic?! Sorry your dad didn't work anywhere cool tho. :(
        viking123 8mo ago
        Who cares about these journalists. My point is that Amodei is a complete ghoul and loves fear mongering normies and being racist towards Chinese while HIS company stole all the damn books in the world. I hope the Chinese steal all their data and keep doing public models. This guy can't even figure a solution for his balding head let alone making an AGI lmao. But let Anthropic keep tricking midwits along. Elon has 100x the backbone that these fraudsters have btw. For God's sake these guys are selling the doubling of human life span to some desperate elderly investors. Really going for people's deepest fears there. Oh yes just invest in us so you can get double the life span and don't have to die!
        neom 8mo ago
        Alright well I can tell you're grumpy about this so how about we agree to disagree? I don't know Dario so I couldn't say, but I do trust Jack a lot. That aside: this is the 3rd time I've heard the racist towards Chinese thing, what exactly is that all about if you'd be willing to save me a google?
integricho 8mo ago
Written by an anthropic employee, I mean how seriously can you take that piece? pure hype
- neom 8mo ago
  I think it's coupled differential equations where each growth factor amplifies the others, I posted about it in 2024 - https://b.h4x.zip/ce/ https://b.h4x.zip/ce/ - sent it around a bit but everyone thought I was nuts, look at that post from 2025 and think about what was happening IRL under the graphs line, then go look at where METR is today. I'm not trying to brag, I don't work for anthropic, but I do think I'm probably right.
  - munksbeer 8mo ago
    Access blocked, suspicious site.
    - neom 8mo ago
      Firewall blocking it? Weird, dns is all fine.
- sidewndr46 8mo ago
  I only take it partially seriously. I view it as a serious presentation that is misinformed. What I find unique is that people have become so interested in "the exponential" it's almost become like an axiom, or even a near religious belief in AI. It is a subtle admission that while current AI capabilities are impressive, it requires additional years of exponential growth for AI to reach the fantastic claims some people are making. All glory to the exponential!
moregrist 8mo ago
This is written with the idea that the exponential part keeps going forever. It never does. The progress curve always looks sigmoidal. - The beginning looks like a hockey stick, and people get excited. The assumption is that the growth party will never stop. - You start to hit something that inherently limits the exponential growth and growth starts to be linear. It still kinda looks exponential and the people that want the party to keep growing will keep the hype up. - Eventually you saturate something and the curve turns over. At this point it’s obvious to all but the most dedicated party-goers. I don’t know where we are on the LLM curve, but I would guess we’re in the linear part. Which might keep going for a while. Or maybe it turns over this year. No one knows. But the party won’t go on forever; it never does. I think Cal Newport’s piece [0] is far more realistic: > But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. [0] Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505735
PollardsRho 8mo ago
> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. This is the part I find very strange. Let's table the problems with METR [1], just noting that benchmarking AI is extremely hard and METR's methodology is not gospel just because METR's "sole purpose is to study AI capabilities". (That is not a good way to evaluate research!) Taking whatever idealized metric you want, at some point it has to level off. That's almost trivially true: everyone should agree that unrestricted exponential growth forever is impossible, if only for the eventual heat death of the universe. That makes the question when, and not if. When do external forces dominate whatever positive feedback loops were causing the original growth? In AI, those positive feedback loops include increased funding, increased research attention and human capital, increased focus on AI-friendly hardware, and many others, including perhaps some small element of AI itself assisting the research process that could become more relevant in the future. These positive feedback loops have happened many times, and they often do experience quite sharp level-offs as some external factor kicks in. Commercial aircraft speeds experienced a very sharp increase until they leveled off. Many companies grow very rapidly at first and then level off. Pandemics grow exponentially at first before revealing their logistic behavior. Scientific progress often follows a similar trajectory: a promising field emerges, significant increased attention brings a bevy of discoveries, and as the low-hanging fruit is picked the cost of additional breakthroughs surges and whatever fundamental limitations the approach has reveal themselves. It's not "extremely surprising" that COVID did not infect a trillion people, even though there are some extremely sharp exponentials you can find looking at the first spread in new areas. It isn't extremely surprising that I don't book flights at Mach 3, or that Moore's Law was not an ironclad law of the universe. Does that mean the entire field will stop making any sort of progress? Of course not. But any analysis that fundamentally boils down to taking a (deeply flawed) graph and drawing a line through it and simplifying the whole field of AI research to "line go up" is not going to give you well-founded predictions for the future. A much more fruitful line of analysis, in my view, is to focus on the actual conditions and build a reasonable model of AI progress that includes current data while building in estimations of sigmoidal behavior. Does training scaling continue forever? Probably not, given the problems with e.g., GPT-4.5 and the limited amount of quality non-synthetic training data. It's reasonable to expect synthetic training data to work better over time, and it's also reasonable to expect the next generation of hardware to also enable an additional couple orders of magnitude. Beyond that, especially if the money runs out, it seems like scaling will hit a pretty hard wall barring exceptional progress. Is inference hardware going to get better enough that drastically increased token outputs and parallelism won't matter? Probably not, but you can definitely forecast continued hardware improvements to some degree. What might a new architectural paradigm be for AI, and would that have significant improvements over current methodology? To what degree is existing AI deployment increasing the amount of useful data for AI training? What parts of the AI improvement cycle rely on real-world tasks that might fundamentally limit progress? That's what the discussion should be, not reposting METR for the millionth time and saying "line go up" the way people do about Bitcoin. [1] https://www.transformernews.ai/p/against-the-metr-graph-coding-capabilities-software-jobs-task-ai https://www.transformernews.ai/p/against-the-metr-graph-codi...
bendbro 8mo ago
tl;dr The best ~AI's~ LLM's slop asymptote is 10 hours. Restated, if you let the best LLM chomp on a task for 10 hours, the output becomes slop. * These tasks are of the type that you spend 1% of your SWE career working on. * Each task is primed with an essay length prompt. * You must play needle in the haystack for bugs in 10 hours worth of AI generated slop. My experience trying AI coding at work and my observations of AI evangelists makes me believe AI coding is exclusively the purview of people who willing to handhold an AI at half pace to achieve the same result while working on software which amounts to greenfield/toy problems. The danger of LLMs to thought work is enormously overstated and intentionally overhyped. AI : StackOverflow :: StackOverflow : graybeard in basement It would be cool if AI kills all thought work, but what will actually happen is a undersupply of SWEs and a second golden age of SWE salaries in like 15y. https://github.com/METR/public-tasks/tree/main https://github.com/METR/public-tasks/tree/main

co_king_3 8mo ago

[flagged]

observationist 8mo ago
Are you talking about Dario, or Dwarkesh? Dario is a true believer. He thinks he's right. There's no scam or deception happening there. The outcome, however, is the same as if he were, unfortunately. Dwarkesh is a wonderful, phenomenal human, and we're lucky to have him.
- co_king_3 8mo ago
  ...
- rvz 8mo ago
  > There's no scam or deception happening there. Oh sweet summer child.
  - uejfiweun 8mo ago
    Care to actually explain rather than post reddit-tier snark?
    - rvz 8mo ago
      It is purely psychological. He is selling fear through scaremongering about safety when that is just a marketing scapegoat for everyone to continue buying more tokens to use Claude. Why do you think he continues to scare-monger about open weight models?
      - uejfiweun 8mo ago
        Hmm. So you're saying that he's intentionally overhyping the danger of ML models in a cynical play to eliminate open models through regulation or backlash, when in reality there is no danger. But if this is the case why isn't Altman and Demis saying the same?

GorbachevyChase 8mo ago

Does anyone know who Dwarkesh’s patron is that boosted him in podcast world? He isn’t otherwise highly distinguished and admitted does his show prep with AI which sometimes shows in his questions. I feel like there are a very large number of tech podcasts, but there’s some marketing effect around this guy that I just don’t understand.

co_king_3 8mo ago
Who's he doing the interview with?
- schmidtleonard 8mo ago
  Exactly, it's the Lex Fridman gambit: a reputation for asking safe questions to powerful people tends to snowball because "safe, popular interview platform" is something they are all looking to self-promote on. If you want to see the mask slip, watch Lex's interview with Zelensky.
  - HDThoreaun 8mo ago
    Friedman's Zelensky interview was terrible but I think that has more to do with him being a russian nationalist than a bad podcast host
jstummbillig 8mo ago
If you think there are as or more interesting podcasts out there, feel free to name them.
- moralestapia 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 8mo ago
    Please don't do this here.

seydor 8mo ago

We ll need a new word after 'genius'

jaredcwhite 8mo ago

"Nobody disagrees we'll achieve AGI this century." Citation needed please.

dude250711 8mo ago
Nobody in their little bubble.
ponector 8mo ago
It's easy to say as almost no one of working age is going to live to the end of the century. Also the same as with saying that "nuclear fussion unlimited energy is 20 years away"

deathanatos 8mo ago

> Nobody at this point disagrees we’re going to achieve AGI this century. Nobody. Nobody disagrees, there is zero disagreement, there is no war in Ba Sing Se. > 100% of today’s SWE tasks are done by the models. Thank God, maybe I can go lie in the sun then instead of having to solve everyone's problems with ancient tech that I wonder why humanity is even still using. Oh, no? I'm still untying corporate Gordian knots? > There is no reason why a developer at a large enterprise should not be adopting Claude Code as quickly as an individual developer or developer at a startup. My company tried this, then quickly stopped: $$$

coffeefirst 8mo ago
I’m honestly trying to understand the state of the art and unfortunately the industry is so grifty it’s hard to tell… Can I ask what happened with your Claude Code rollout?
stego-tech 8mo ago
> Nobody disagrees, there is zero disagreement, there is no war in Ba Sing Se. This captures my chief irk over these sorts of "interviews" and AI boosterism quite nicely. Assume they're being 100% honest that they genuinely believe nobody disagrees with their statement. That leaves one of two possible outcomes: 1) They have not ingested data from beyond their narrow echo chamber that could challenge their perceptions, revealing an irresponsible, nay, negligent amount of ignorance for people in positions of authority or power OR 2) They do not see their opponents as people. Like, that's it. They're either ignorant or they view their opposition as subhuman. There is no gray area here, and it's why I get riled up when they're allowed to speak unchallenged at length like this. Genuinely good ideas don't need this much defense, and genuinely useful technologies don't need to be forced down throats.
- co_king_3 8mo ago
  > They do not see their opponents as people. You hit the nail on their head. They go out of their way to call you an "AI bot" if you say something that contradicts their delusional world view.

taco_emoji 8mo ago

thanks for the autoplay audio crap

theideaofcoffee 8mo ago

> end of the exponential. Oh good, hopefully it'll model itself after an exponential rise in any sort of animal populations and collapse on itself because it can no longer be sustained! Isn't that how things go in exponential systems with resource constraints? We can only hope that will be the best outcome. That would be wonderful.

supergilbert 8mo ago

I find myself coding a lot with Claude Code.. but then it's very hard to quantify the productivity boost. The first 80% seem magical, the last ones are painful. I have to basically get the mental model of the codebase in my head no matter what.

co_king_3 8mo ago
This is my experience, which is why I stopped altogether. I think I'm better off developing a broad knowledge of design patterns and learning the codebases I work with in intricate, painstaking detail as opposed to trying to "go fast" with LLMs.
- le-mark 8mo ago
  I agree and to address this I’ve tried using them to understand large code bases, I haven’t worked out how to prompt this effectively yet. Has anyone gone this route?
- GoatInGrey 8mo ago
  It's the evergreen tradeoff between the short and long terms. Do I get the nugget of information I need right now but lose in a month, or do I spend the time and energy that leads to deeper understanding and years-long retention of the knowledge? There is something about our biology that makes us learn better when we struggle. There are many concepts on this dynamic: generation effect, testing effect, spacing effect, desirable difficulties, productive failure...it all converges on the same phenomenon where the easier it is to learn, the worse we learn. Take K-12 for instance. As computing technology is further and further integrated into education, cognitive performance decreases in a near-linear relationship. Gen Z is famously the first generation to perform worse in every cognitive measure than previous generations, for as long as we've been recording since the 19th century. An uncomfortable truth emerging from studies on electronics usage in schools is that it isn't just the phones driving this. It's more so the Duolingo effect of software overall emulating the sensation of learning without actually changing the brain state. Because the software that actually challenges you is not as engaging or enjoyable. How you learn, and your ability to parse, infer, and derive meaning from large bodies of information, is increasingly a differentiator in both the personal and professional worlds. It's even more so the case when many of your peers are now learning through LLM-generated summaries averaging just 300 words, perhaps skimming outputs around 1,000 words in length for "important information". The immediate benefits are obvious, but the cost of outsourcing that cognitive work gets lost in the convenience. Because remember, this isn't just about your ability to recall specific regex, follow a syntax convention, or how much code you ship in an hour. Your brain needs exercise, and deep learning is one of the most reliable ways to get it. Doubly true if you're not even writing your own class names. What I am speaking to is not far away or hypothetical, either. Because as of 2023, one in four young adults in the United States is functionally illiterate. https://www.the74million.org/article/many-young-adults-barely-literate-yet-earned-a-high-school-diploma/ https://www.the74million.org/article/many-young-adults-barel...

almostdeadguy 8mo ago

Is no one disturbed by this? At the rate this seems to be happening its going to cause massive disruptions to society and endanger a lot of people.

co_king_3 8mo ago
If you're disturbed by this your comment gets flagged and removed by Anthropic astroturfers.
lkbm 8mo ago
Uh...there's constant talk from people being disturbed by it. One of the Democratic candidates in 2020 had his platform based around this, and I can assure you that it's not gotten less attention since ChatGPT came out.
coffeefirst 8mo ago
That’s the point. AI marketing is dystopian. They describe a world where most people are suddenly starving and homeless, and just when you start to think “hey this sounds like the conditions to create something like a French Revolution but where Bastille is a data center” they pivot to BUY MY PRODUCT SO YOU DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. It’s advertising straight through the amygdala. I have no idea if they actually believe this. But it’s repulsive behavior.
- almostdeadguy 8mo ago
  I'm legitimately terrified by these people, and seriously worried now that this is not just hype and that they truly don't care about what will happen. And that they may use these models to insulate themselves from the consequences when that time comes. The fact that Nick Land has taken hold as a philosopher in some circles in Silicon Valley truly scares me: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-faith-of-nick-land/ https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-faith-of-nick-land/
  - gom_jabbar 8mo ago
    Nick Land is arguably the most influential philosopher in SV (at least over the past 3 years). Marc Andreessen's acknowledgment of Land in his 2023 The Techno-Optimist Manifesto has brought his underground influence more to the surface. Land's explicit anti-humanism can be repulsive to some on first encounter, but some of his ideas -- e.g. about the identity of capitalism and AI, the autonomization of capital, the technological singularity as capitalism's inherent teleology -- are interesting and can provide a very unique perspective. It's also important to note that he tends to resonate more with creative types. Historically, these were mostly artists. Today, they are also founders (who are psychometrically similar to artists at the population level).

atomic128 8mo ago

Anthropic's interests are not aligned with the interests of the human species. Quoting the Anthropic safety guy who just exited, making a bizarre and financially detrimental move: "the world is in peril" (https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/02/09/anthropic-ai-safety-researcher-warns-of-world-in-peril-in-resignation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/02/09/anthropi...) There are people in the AI industry who are urgently warning you. Myself and my colleagues, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_seek_to_poison/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see... Regulation will not stop this. It's time to build and deploy weapons if you want your species to survive. See earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964545

rishabhaiover 8mo ago
Calm down, hysteria doesn't serve any side well.
- atomic128 8mo ago
  Geoffrey Hinton's assessment of the situation may sound hysterical to you but we have come to believe that he is largely correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton). Hinton understands the dire nature of the threat but overestimates the value of regulation in a world where the threatening technology is under development world-wide. We think regulation is basically impotent and large-scale information weapons are more viable as a solution. This is not the time to be a docile onlooker and we urge you to take action.
  - UltraSane 8mo ago
    LLMs will have to improve drastically before I take these hysterical warning seriously.
- rramadass 8mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47014519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47014519

dude250711 8mo ago

I think there is a parallel universe where tools like Claud Code actually truly work as advertised but I am not allowed into it... Yet news and opinions from that world somehow seep through into my reality...

co_king_3 8mo ago
They probably have the ability to give executives higher quality/more expensive models in the backend.

readitalready 8mo ago

LLMs alone aren't the way to AGI. Perhaps something involving a merge of diffusion or other models that are based on more sensory elements, like images, time, and motion, but LLMs alone aren't going to get us there. The end of the exponential means the start of other models.

rishabhaiover 8mo ago
> LLMs alone aren't the way to AGI Pretraining + RL works, there is no clear evidence that it doesn't scale further.
- readitalready 8mo ago
  Pretraining + RL itself is the scaling limit. If you feed it the entire dataset before 1905, LLMs aren't going to come up with general relativity. It has no concept of physics, or time even. AGI happens when you DON'T need to scale pertaining + RL.
  - acuozzo 8mo ago
    > If you feed it the entire dataset before 1905, LLMs aren't going to come up with general relativity. Link?
    - Jensson 8mo ago
      You don't need a source for that, an LLM with such little data is barely able to form proper sentences.
      - acuozzo 8mo ago
        > an LLM with such little data There is a mountain of data pre-1905. Certainly enough to train a decent 30B parameter model. Now, digitizing & OCRing all of that data... THAT is a challenge.
  - rishabhaiover 8mo ago

lancebeet 8mo ago

Is "the end of the exponential" an established expression? There's no singularity in an exponential so the expression doesn't make sense to me. To me, it sounds like "the end of the exponential part", meaning it's a sigmoid, but that's obviously not what he means.

deleted 8mo ago
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incrudible 8mo ago
Why should it be obvious that this is not what he means? I struggle to think how he could mean anything else.
- lancebeet 8mo ago
  Well, he says >To me, it is absolutely wild that you have people — within the bubble and outside the bubble — talking about the same tired, old hot-button political issues, when we are near the end of the exponential. My interpretation is "It's pointless to discuss the old political issues, because they're not going to be relevant once AGI is achieved". So if he does believe in a plateau, it either contradicts his other prediction (that AGI will be reached in a year or two), or he believes it will plateau after AGI is already reached, which means it's kind of a pointless statement. The important thing w.r.t. all our problems being solved would the advent of AGI, not the plateau.
  - tylervigen 8mo ago
    I think he believe in a plateau on the y axis instead of the x axis… which is AGI.
    - basket_horse 8mo ago
      I took the “end” to mean the part of the exponential where it quickly trends towards infinity. So let’s say the x axis is time (by which you get more training data and more compute) and the y axis is model ability. So far, if we think we are in the beginning of the exponential, adding data/compute looks almost linear to the untrained eye in terms of model capability. But once you hit a threshold, where he thinks the model will start to generalize, a small amount of data/compute will result in a massive increase in model ability.

alephnerd 8mo ago

[flagged]

Philpax 8mo ago
[flagged]
- co_king_3 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  How? I think both Lex Friedman and Dwarkesh Patel provide little substance and only sizzle.
  - RobertBobert 8mo ago
    [dead]
- phainopepla2 8mo ago
  Which part is racist exactly?
DarkCrusader2 8mo ago
I highly doubt that. "The algorithm" will surely adjust the recommendations per geography. I don't think most westerners are getting T-Series recommendation in their feed as well. > He's an Indian Lex Friedman (and I mean that derogatorily) I might be reading this wrong, but sounds kinda racist to me?
- preuceian 8mo ago
  The insult is that hes similar to Lex Fridman, not that hes Indian.
GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
I could see a cynical media mogul seeing that market as a box that needs to be checked. I wonder who makes those decisions, though. Spotify?

crossbody 8mo ago

The concept of the "end of the exponential" sounds like a tech version of Fukuyama's much mocked "End of History". Amodei seems to think we’ll solve all the "useful" problems and then hit a ceiling of utility. But if you’ve read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Amodei’s view looks like a mistake. Knowledge creation is unbounded. Solving diseases/coding shouldn't result in a plateau, but rather unlock totally new, "better" problems we can't even conceive of yet. It's the begining of Inifinity, no end in sight!

skybrian 8mo ago
Haven't watched the video, but the end of exponential growth isn't the end of growth. It means the percentage growth per year decreases. The Internet also went through an exponential growth phase at the beginning.
- trhway 8mo ago
  >the end of exponential growth we're on the verge of getting to Moon and Mars in more than rare tourist numbers and with notable payloads. Add to that advancements in robotics, which will change things here on Earth as well as in space. The growth is only starting. >The Internet also went through an exponential growth phase at the beginning. If we consider general Internet as all the devices connected i think the exponential growth is still on as for example ARM CPUs shipments: 2002: Passed 1 billion cumulative chips shipped. 2011: Surpassed 1 billion units shipped in a single year. 2015: Running at ~12 billion units per year. 2020 (Q4): Record 6.7 billion chips shipped in one quarter (842 chips per second). 2020: Total cumulative shipments crossed 150 billion. 2024 (FY): Nearly 29 billion ARM chips shipped in 12 months. 2025: Total cumulative shipments exceeded 250 billion.
  - skybrian 8mo ago
    I was thinking about user traffic, but sure, it depends what you look at.
  - refulgentis 8mo ago
    > we're on the verge of getting to Moon and Mars in more than rare tourist numbers Cross-country full-self driving, too

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

viking123 8mo ago

I have said that Amodei is by far worse than Sam Altman. Altman wants money but this guy wants the money AND to be your dad by censoring the shit out of the model and wagging his finger at you what you can say or what you cannot. And lobbying for legislation to block competition. Also the constant "muh china" whining while these guys stole all the books in the world. Every time I read something from Dario, it seems like he is grifting normies and other midwits with his "OHHH MY GOD CLAUDE WAS KILLING TO KILL SOMEONE! MY GOD IT WANTS TO BREAK OUT!" Then they have all their Claude constitution bullshit and other nonsense to fool idiots. Yeah bro the model with static weights is truly going to take over. He knows what he is doing, it's all marketing and they have put shit ton of money into it if you have been following the media for the last few months. Btw, it wasn't many months ago that this guy was hawking doubling of human life span at a group of some boomer investors. Oh yeah I wonder why he decided to bring it up there? Maybe because the audience is old and desperate and that scammers play on this weaknesses. Truly of one of the more obnoxious people in the AI space and frankly by extension Anthropic is scammy too. I rather pay Altman than give these guys a penny and that says a lot.

tedsanders 8mo ago
Amodei isn't a grifter; the difference is that he really believes powerful AI is imminent. If you truly believe powerful AI is imminent, then it makes perfect sense to be worried about alignment failures. If a powerless 5 year old human mewls they're going to kill someone, we don't go ballistic because we know they have many years to grow up. But if a powerless 5 year old alien says they're going to kill someone, and in one year they'll be a powerful demigod, then it's quite logical to be extremely concerned about the currently harmless thoughts, because soon they could be quite harmful. I myself don't think powerful AI is 1-2 years away, but I do take Amodei and others as genuine, and I think what they're saying does make logical sense if you believe powerful AI is imminent.
- hackable_sand 8mo ago
  The veil is shifting He will get more violent with his rhetoric
- 8mo ago

knivets 8mo ago

The closer the bubble to popping the more desperate these people sound. > 100% of today’s SWE tasks are done by the models. Maybe that’s why the software is so shitty nowadays.

ponector 8mo ago
This and popular trend to layoff whole QA department.
- le-mark 8mo ago
  That’s been a trope long before AI. QA coverage has always been cyclical in my experience. In good times there is hiring and QA. Lean times QA is the first to go.
cxvwK 8mo ago
Correct. Trust me if they felt really confident the thing they are working on would up-end society, these jokers would go full steam ahead and not tell you anything. This experiment is going to fail. I only hope SWEs finally grab their balls and accept the social contract has been fundamentally broken and that they should not treat their employers so kindly next time.
JohnnyMarcone 8mo ago
> 100% of today’s SWE tasks are done by the models. I do think he was overstating the current state of the models by a bit, but this is taken out of context. He is not saying this is where the models are at today. He gives a spectrum [18:30] of the models taking over the SWE jobs: - Model writes 90% of code (today) - Model writes 100% of code - Model does 90% of today's SWE tasks (end-to-end) - Model does 100% of today's SWE tasks - The SWE job creates new tasks that didn't exist before - Model does the new SWE tasks as well (90% reduction in demand for SWE)

bakibab 8mo ago

One of my friends and I started building a PaaS for a niche tech stack, believing that we could use Claude for all sorts of code generation activities. We thought, if Anthropic and OpenAI are claiming that most of the code is written by LLMs in new product launches, we could start using it too. Unsurprisingly, we were able to build a demo platform within a few days. But when we started building the actual platform, we realized that the code generated by Claude is hard to extend, and a lot of replanning and reworking needs to be done every time you try to add a major feature. This brought our confidence level down. We still want to believe that Claude will help in generating code. But I no longer believe that Claude will be able to write complex software on its own. Now we are treating Claude as a junior person on the team and give it well-defined, specific tasks to complete.

epolanski 8mo ago
I don't think this is much of a problem with the tools rather than with your approach. We have successfully put Claude in huge multi-thousands pr long with projects. But this meant that: 1. Solid architectural and design decisions were made already after much trial and error 2. They were further refined and refactored 3. Countless hours have been spent in documenting, writing proper skills and architectural and best practice documents Only then Claude started paying off, and even then it's an iterative process where you need to understand why it tries to hack his way out, etc, what to check, what to supervise. Seriously if you think you can just Claude create some project.. Just fork an existing one that does some larger % of what you need and spend most of the initial time scaffolding it to be ai friendly. Also, you need to invest in harnessing, giving tools and ways to the LLM to not go off rails. Strongly typed languages, plenty of compilation and diagnostics tools, access to debuggers or browser mcps, etc. It's not impossible, but you need to approach it with an experimentation approach, not drinking Kool aid.
- cxvwK 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- mythrwy 8mo ago
  I guess I'd rather just complete one tiny part at a time with Claude and understand the output then do all that. It seems like less effort and infrastructure. And a lot more certain in outcome.

holtkam2 8mo ago

No matter how fast and accurately your AI apps can spit out code (or PowerPoints, or excel spreadsheets, or business plans, etc) you will still need humans to understand how stuff works. If it’s truly business critical software, you can’t get around the fact that humans need to deeply understand how and why it works, in case something goes wrong and they need to explain to the CEO what happened. Even in a world where the software is 100% written by AI in 1 millisecond by a country of geniuses in a data center, humans still need to have their hands firmly on the wheel if they won’t want to risk their businesses well being. That means taking the time to understand what the AI put together. That will be the bottleneck regardless of how fast and smart AI is. Because unless the CEO wants to be held accountable for what the AI builds and deploys, humans will need to be there to take the responsibility for its output.

nemo1618 8mo ago
> humans still need to have their hands firmly on the wheel if they won’t want to risk their businesses well being What happens when businesses run by AIs outperform businesses run by humans?
- entech 8mo ago
  The humans will still own the business (unless you are proposing some alternative version of AI ownership), so in effect there will be always a human who is concerned about their business’s well being. I doubt that we would get into a world where a company would be allowed to run without human involvement (AI directors and AI management) as you will have nobody to hold accountable.
  - KellyCriterion 8mo ago
    Well, wasnt this what are all these blockchain DAO entites where supposed for? :D
    - gom_jabbar 8mo ago
      Yes, I was just about to bring this up as well. One could argue that they were simply too early. It will be interesting to watch things like ERC-8004.

reducesuffering 8mo ago

It's difficult to understate how wrong HN has been on AI since the founding of OpenAI and how consistently right Dario and AI X-riskers have been.

nemo1618 8mo ago
I think it's a combination of a) reflexive dislike of any hyped-up tech, mainly due to the crypto era, and b) subconscious ego protection ("this can't be legit, otherwise everything I've built my identity around will be thrown into question"). The best models already produce better code than a significant fraction of human programmers, while also being orders of magnitude faster and cheaper. And the trendlines are stark. Sure, maybe AI can't replace you today. Maybe it will hit that "wall" people are always forecasting, just before it gets good enough to threaten your job. But that's a rather uncomfortable proposition to bet a career on.

surgical_fire 8mo ago

Eat meat, said the butcher

polotics 8mo ago

Referring to a curve with a derivative everywhere equal to its value as something that has an end gives the game away: pure fanciful nominalization with no grounding in any kind of concrete modelling of any constraints. IMHO this is really silly: we already know that IQ is useful as a metric in the 0 to about 130 range. For any value above the delta fails to provide predictive power on real-world metrics. Just this simple fact makes the verbiage here moot. Also let's consider the wattage involved...

Davidzheng 8mo ago

It's difficult for me to express this view, which I hold genuinely, without reading as lacking in humanity. However, I think it would be disastrous for humanity as a whole if we eliminate disease completely. To fight against it and to make progress in that fight is of course deeply human. And we are all affected emotionally and personally by disease of all forms. But if we win the fight against disease, I am almost sure that the human race will just end as a (long term) consequence.

nathan_douglas 8mo ago
Could you elaborate? How do you see this playing out? Is this unique to disease or do you believe it's also true of other forms of suffering, e.g. poverty?
- Davidzheng 8mo ago
  Well I think anything which gives humans unbounded lifespans is probably going end human civilization long term. So I don't think eliminating poverty is dangerous in a similar way no.
  - nathan_douglas 8mo ago
    Because of resource exhaustion or a spiritual crisis or something else/something in addition?

AIorNot 8mo ago

Its Dario's job to hype the product and he hypes the product to get the billons they need- a bit more engineering focused than Altman, but no fundamental difference. A large language model like GPT runs in what you’d call a forward pass. You give it tokens, it pushes them through a giant neural network once, and it predicts the next token. No weights change. Just matrix multiplications and nonlinearities. So at inference time, it does not “learn” in the training sense we need some kind of new architecture to get to next gen wow stuff e.g differentiable memory systems. ie instead of modifying weights, the model writes to a structured memory that is itself part of the computation graph. More dynamic or modular architectures not bigger scalling and spending all our money on data centers anybody in the ML community have an answer for this? (besides better RL and RHLF and World Models)

kubb 8mo ago
Yes, 100% this. But it won’t get funded. Everything will get eaten up by the impressive LLM dead end.
senordevnyc 8mo ago
They talk about this at length in the interview
menaerus 8mo ago
> So at inference time, it does not “learn” in the training sense It learns because it remembers the context. The larger the context, the better the capabilities of the model are. I mean just give it a try and see for yourself - start building a feature, then next feature, then the next one etc. Do it in the same "workspace" or "session" and after few days, one or two weeks of writing code with the agent, you will notice that it somehow magically remembers the stuff and builds upon that context. It becomes slower too. "Re-learning" is something different and it may not be even needed.

thadk 8mo ago

"We're not perfectly good at preventing some of these other [model] companies from using our models internally." — well maybe this says something about how Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 have the same SWE bench score.

refulgentis 8mo ago
Also explains why GLM 4.x+ and 5 always think they're Claude. Gives me a smile but, not cool.

dwohnitmok 8mo ago

This is an extremely confusing snippet from the interview for Patel to put as the title. Amodei does not mean that things are plateauing (i.e. the exponential will no longer hold), but rather uses "end" closer to the notion of "endgame," that is we are getting to the point where all benchmarks pegged to human ability will be saturated and the AI systems will be better than any human at any cognitive task. Amodei lays this out here: > [with regards to] the “country of geniuses in a data center”. My picture for that, if you made me guess, is one to two years, maybe one to three years. It’s really hard to tell. I have a strong view—99%, 95%—that all this will happen in 10 years. I think that’s just a super safe bet. I have a hunch—this is more like a 50/50 thing—that it’s going to be more like one to two [years], maybe more like one to three. This is why Amodei opens with > What has been the most surprising thing is the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential. To me, it is absolutely wild that you have people — within the bubble and outside the bubble — talking about the same tired, old hot-button political issues, when we are near the end of the exponential. Whether you agree with him is of course a different matter altogether, but a clearer phrasing would probably be "We are near the endgame."

rramadass 8mo ago
Nicely articulated and thanks for pointing this out. It is a 2+hrs video and hence a summary of main themes is welcome.
adrian_b 8mo ago
Regarding "AI systems will be better than any human at any cognitive task", while I believe that this may become possible in a distant future, with systems having a quite different structure, I do not see any evidence of such a thing becoming possible during the next decade or two. Nothing that I have seen described here on HN or elsewhere, by the most enthusiast users of AI, who claim that their own productivity has been multiplied, does not demonstrate performance in cognitive tasks even remotely comparable with that of a competent human, much less better performance. All that I see is that the AI systems outperform humans for various tasks only because they had access in their training data to much more information than most humans are allowed to access, because they do not have enough money to obtain such access, both because the various copyright paywalls and also because of the actual cost of storage and retrieval systems. Using an AI agent may be faster than if you were given access to the training data and you would use conventional search tools on it, but the speed may be illusory, because when I search something and I have access to the original sources I can validate the search results faster and with much more certainty than when I try to ponder about the correctness of what AI has provided, e.g. whether a program produced by it really does what I have requested and it is bug free (in comparison with having access to its training programs and being able to choose myself what to copy and paste). I hope that paid access to AI tools gives better results, but the AI replies that popular search engines, like Google and Bing, force upon their users have made Internet searches much worse not better, as their answers always contain something else than I want, and this is in the best case, when the answers are not plainly wrong.

sudohalt 8mo ago

I feel there is an elephant in the room not being discussed. Why does he care about "diffusion of the model" within the economy? If he truly believes there will be the development of a data center of geniuses wouldn't that imply complete market capture. Who cares if pharmaceutical companies or any other business is slow to adopt the AI, the AI will capture that market entirely making those companies obsolete. An API model wouldn't even make sense in this scenario because why would you sell your model when you can capture the entire economy of the business using your model.

menaerus 8mo ago
> Who cares if pharmaceutical companies or any other business is slow to adopt the AI, the AI will capture that market entirely making those companies obsolete It wouldn't because of things which are not of a technical nature. Trials for instance might take much longer than developing the drug. Or complying with whatever regulations of given industry which normally requires some heavy-lifting process which is normally run by humans.
- sudohalt 8mo ago
  In those cases the AI can spin up a shell corp and run the clinical trials, humans would administer the trials (maybe robots can do it). There is already hundreds of pharmaceutical companies so it isn’t difficult for an AI to spin up another and bring in humans when needed

nylonstrung 8mo ago

Dario is a serial bullshitter and one of the least reliable in the industry when it comes to his predictions. Anthropic is doing good work but he's personally responsible for a good deal of the Irrational Exuberance that plagues the space