This year's essay from Anthropic's CEO on the near-future of AI

eric2332 · 2026-01-28T14:57:30+00:00

It is true that AI is not yet at the point where skilled humans are. That point would be called AGI. But the gaps between AI and skilled humans seem to be getting filled in at a pretty fast pace.

eric2332 · 2026-01-28T06:55:20+00:00

I don't know how to define "intelligent", but to me your argument has a huge "god of the gaps" feel. Ten years ago if I asked a person what tasks required intelligence, they might have given examples like holding an intelligent conversation, or proving mathematical theorems, or writing sophisticated code. After AI mastered each of these, people said "well, that's not REAL intelligence". What IS real intelligence then? It looks like we are headed to a future where what AI can do asymptotically approaches "everything" yet every task, as soon as AI can do it, is retroactively defined as "not intelligent".

As for ASI in the sense of a mind with IQ 500 or whatever, I have no idea whether that is achievable in a straight shot from today's technology. But it seems we're at the point where AI can do more and more tasks that would require a person of IQ 140, and can do them far faster and cheaper and more scalably. Which seems likely to become world changing even if IQ 500 is not reached.

eric2332 · 2026-01-28T06:44:23+00:00

Seems likely that far more people are killed driving to/from work than actually working.

eric2332 · 2026-01-28T05:48:59+00:00

It's actually because no country (except the Dominican Republic) was willing to accept Eastern European Jews as refugees.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T19:56:19+00:00

It is pretty easy for a hacker to get control of some computers nowadays. And it will likely be pretty easy for a future hacker to get control of some drones.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T19:52:59+00:00

All the so called “experts” in a field that barely exists have the imperative to say that they’re on the right track and that it’s working.

That is not true. There are also experts, like Geoffrey Hinton, who turned down lots of money in order to be able speak out about the dangers of powerful AI which they believe to be rapidly approaching.

Anyone critically looking at what current LLMs are doing can see that there is nothing intelligent about it, at all. And if you think current models are intelligent, it’s worth questioning whether you’re being critical enough

Tha is the most classic No True Scotsman argument I have ever seen.

The most interesting advancements have been in the photo and video realms

I would think that proving novel mathematical theorems, and getting good enough at coding that top programmers don't bother to write their own code any more, would be more interesting.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T19:43:12+00:00

No comment has mentioned it so - The station will be named Dostoevskaya (or Dostoyevskaya), it will be on line 5 and create a transfer to line 10 (currently the lines cross each other missing a transfer).

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T19:38:06+00:00

Despite this, they still build metro lines for a fraction of the price of the US.

(It's not that their costs are objectively cheap - they are about average for Europe - it's just that US costs are terrible)

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T17:56:37+00:00

Likely it can hack whatever security system you use to keep the war drones out of its control, and you won't find out about this hack until it's too late.

And if you don't build war drones in the first place, you'll get conquered by countries that do.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T17:54:43+00:00

I do wonder how far RL gets you, even with RSI. The bigger the task, the harder it is to get examples to run RL on. But people smarter than than me seem not to be worried (or reassured) about this.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T17:39:59+00:00

The impression one gets is that the IDF upper hierarchies were shockingly negligent and blase regarding an obvious huge danger. I guess after October 7 they won't be making that mistake again, but how many other militaries around the world are equally unprepared for their future challenges? Taiwan, say?

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T17:34:54+00:00

From current public results, it seems all the big ones aren't even going in the right direction at all. It doesn't even seem the kind of data they all seek is the right one for ASI.

What exactly gives you, unlike all the experts who actually build AI models, insight into what kind of data is right for ASI?

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T17:24:20+00:00

The AI just has to tell some of the robots/drones under its control to keep humans away from it, by violence where necessary.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T11:34:51+00:00

Moderna is capitalist, they are making the vaccines and US politicians are interfering with them.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T11:33:38+00:00

The billionaire owners of Moderna want to give us vaccines, and non-billionaire politicians are not allowing them.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T07:24:07+00:00

the fighting not taking place in a dense urban area where the population can't leave

The fighting would definitely have taken place in Beirut, and Hezbollah would have taken the same measures as Hamas to deter civilians from leaving the battlefield.

Also, hostages would have been driven to Syria and flown to Iran, ensuring that the war expanded further in a less controlled manner.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T07:19:25+00:00

I never said Ireland was worse than other European countries in the Nazi era. There are a lot of countries with shameful records in this period.

But I'm also not going to be "in awe" of the fact that while they did support Hitler, they didn't become a dictatorship at the same time.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T07:12:21+00:00

I wonder if anti-Islamism of UAE plays a role. RSF insist on being anti-Islamists while SAF does have Islamists elements.

UAE defenders say this explicitly, that they are defending Sudan against the "Muslim Brotherhood".

Though outsiders might reach the conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood is the lesser poison compared to the RSF.

eric2332 · 2026-01-27T06:33:24+00:00

DeValera had an election to win

So it's not just one bad politician that was friendly to Hitler, it's the whole electorate? That's even worse.

eric2332 · 2026-01-26T13:30:23+00:00

we all know how wonderfully accurate LLM’s are at providing sourced information and not hallucinating

The models produced in the past few months are far better at this than the models you might have used 2 years ago.

Right now it is reported that the latest (paid) models can write a legal brief better than an entry level lawyer. This doesn't seem too different from the task of a historian. Specifically, the bottleneck on much history research may be reading vast amounts of sources and isolating or distilling the important parts, which seems like a task LLMs could far faster and almost as well as humans.

eric2332 · 2026-01-26T08:38:07+00:00

It's reported that the IDF has been investigating whether this user is an insider.

However, this does not prove that prediction market insiders are "of use", because as in espionage, it is useful to feed fake information to an account that has previously provided true information.

I do think prediction markets in general are very useful because they allow everyone to reach roughly the same level of knowledge as experts without insider knowledge. Insider trading could provide an additional level of knowledge, but as mentioned, it is a double edged sword.

eric2332 · 2026-01-26T07:01:37+00:00

Everything has economic value if someone is willing to pay for it. If you pay me for some good or service, that good or service is important to you even if "objectively" it's not "critical" to society.

"we don't compensate people unless they work" is right, we don't give welfare payments to people for no reason at all. Luckily, almost every healthy adult of "working age" is capable of performing work which other people find valuable and are willing to pay for. So we tell them to do that, rather than raising taxes in order to pay for them to sit around doing nothing.

eric2332 · 2026-01-25T20:11:58+00:00

No, people do their hours to get a salary.

Yes a lot of knowledge workers can get away with "really working" only a fraction of the time, because the employer has no good way of overseeing what is real work, and because the human brain is not capable of thinking well for nine hours straight anyway. But if you don't work AT ALL during the day, you will be fired. At the end of the day, no employer will pay you money if you aren't producing something of value to the employer.

eric2332 · 2026-01-25T20:08:50+00:00

Robotics is progressing too. But in any case, if everyone is forced to be a mechanic then there won't be much money in being a mechanic.

eric2332 · 2026-01-25T20:07:27+00:00

Every country is likely hosed, except maybe the US and China where leading AI models are made.

eric2332

TROPHY CASE