From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:53:41 +0000, Julian    
   wrote:   
      
   >A few years ago, Dario Amodei was just another techie in San Francisco,   
   >toiling in relative anonymity and playing video games on Sunday nights   
   >with his sister, Daniela.   
   >   
   >Fast forward to today. Amodei is worth billions. He runs one of the   
   >fastest-growing companies in the history of capitalism, and flits around   
   >the globe — Davos one week, Washington the next — to warn about the rise   
   >of an all-powerful artificial intelligence that could snuff out humanity.   
   >   
   >The 43-year-old engineer, bespectacled and with the earnest bearing of   
   >an academic, would be forgiven for feeling a bit of whiplash. Sales at   
   >Anthropic, the company he co-founded with his sister and that is behind   
   >the popular Claude chatbot, have risen from zero at the outset of 2023   
   >to more than $9 billion (£6.5 billion) last year. And this, apparently,   
   >is the thin end of the wedge.   
   >   
   >AI is now developing so fast that it is pushing us towards a reckoning   
   >unlike any faced by any generation. “It cannot possibly be more than a   
   >few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything,”   
   >said Amodei. “I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both   
   >turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species.”   
   >   
   >In short, he is worried about the power of the machines that he, and   
   >others, are building. So last week, he did the equivalent of pulling the   
   >fire alarm, publishing a 19,000-word blog post titled The Adolescence of   
   >Technology. The gist: governments, companies and the public need to wake   
   >up to the tidal wave about to crash over society, in the form of   
   >machines, with Nobel prize-level competency, that will be as common and   
   >accessible as a toaster.   
   >   
   >“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is   
   >deeply unclear whether our social, political and technological systems   
   >possess the maturity to wield it,” Amodei wrote.   
      
   As if an industrialist would warn  people to not use his product. What   
   this is, is a sales pitch, wrapped in an attention grab, inside hand   
   waving fanfare.   
      
   “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power".  But not   
   yet, you want to get on the bandwagon though, don't you?   
      
   >His missive read like a health warning for the human race. Bad actors   
   >could soon use AI to build bio-weapons. AI tools themselves might simply   
   >decide to exterminate humans. Mass job displacement and societal   
   >upheaval were almost guaranteed, within as little as one to five years.   
   >   
   >Beyond the alarmism, his post scratched at a deeper question. When   
   >OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in November 2022, it was a “moment” — a   
   >singular event that kick-started a global AI boom. Yet doubts have begun   
   >to percolate as governments and companies have swept aside regulations   
   >to frantically erect data centres and pour hundreds of billions into the   
   >sector. Anthropic and its rival OpenAI may be growing like weeds, but   
   >they are also losing astounding amounts of money. Thousands of other   
   >start-ups have cropped up in their wake, but none has yet made a dent in   
   >the universe.   
   >   
   >The law of averages means that most never will.   
   >   
   >So are we simply caught in a bubble, inflated by blinkered west coast   
   >techies? Or are we, instead, on the cusp of another “ChatGPT moment”,   
   >when the technology starts to deliver on the hype, for good and for ill?   
   >   
   >“I think 2025 was maybe the most interesting year in my entire career   
   >and probably life. I would expect 2026 to exceed that,” Marc Andreessen,   
   >the billionaire tech investor, said last week. “This stuff is really   
   >working now.”   
   >   
   >‘Smarts’ aren’t all we need   
   >   
   >Nearly 3,000 miles from Silicon Valley, Ethan Mollick, a professor and   
   >co-director of the Generative AI Labs at Wharton business school in   
   >Philadelphia, offered a more nuanced view of a technology that is both   
   >advancing with incredible speed but seeping relatively slowly into the   
   >real world.   
   >   
   >He had recently finished teaching a class of MBA students in which they   
   >were given three days to launch a start-up, from conceiving a business   
   >plan to creating a prototype, with help from AI. “They did ten times   
   >more in three days than they would have got through in a semester not   
   >long ago,” he said. “That’s a real thing.”   
   >   
   >What he saw in his classroom appears to accord with Amodei’s own   
   >experience. Two years ago, AI was “barely capable of writing a single   
   >line of code,” Amodei wrote. Now, he said, it writes “all or almost all   
   >of the code for some people — including engineers at Anthropic. Soon,   
   >they may do the entire task of a software engineer end to end.”   
   >   
   >Now extrapolate this to every other task that requires grey matter. AI   
   >will be better, and not by a little bit: 10 or 100 or 1,000 times faster   
   >and smarter than humans. “It is hard for people to adapt to this pace of   
   >change,” Amodei said.   
   >   
   >Yet that dotted line — from coding agents to the end of the economy,   
   >society and the world as we know it — reflects Silicon Valley’s uniquely   
   >simplistic world view, Mollick said; it’s based on the assumption that   
   >everyone will instantly bin the old way of doing things.   
   >   
   >“There’s this hand-wavy idea that smarts are all you need — that AI is a   
   >bunch of geniuses in a data centre,” he said. “But a genius without   
   >hands, for example, may be enough to make it far less useful for a huge   
   >amount of work.”   
   >   
   >Indeed, OpenAI’s flashy new recruit, former chancellor George Osborne,   
   >said last month that the San Francisco company would focus this year on   
   >closing the “capability overhang” that already exists between what AI   
   >can do and how people and organisations are using it. The message,   
   >similar to Anthropic’s, seems to be: all of us luddites just don’t get it.   
   >   
   >It’s as if we have all discovered fire, but not yet realised we can use   
   >it to cook food, keep us warm and light our way.   
   >   
   >“The goal of the AI labs is to replace all work, and they are sincere in   
   >their belief that they can build a tool capable of doing that. But they   
   >miss the idea of bottlenecks,” Mollick said. “It is increasingly dawning   
   >on CEOs that this is the big one. Like, this is the steam engine. But it   
   >took a long time to figure out how to organise factories for the steam   
   >engine.”   
   >   
   >To wit: Charlie Nunn, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, said last   
   >week that the bank was already using 800 live AI models and has   
   >delivered £1.9 billion of savings over four years through using AI. But   
   >it has not led to a jobs bloodbath, despite predictions from a recent   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)