From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   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.   
      
   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   
   Morgan Stanley report that 200,000 jobs in European banking would be lost.   
      
   On the contrary. Lloyds, which owns Halifax and Bank of Scotland,   
   employs 60,000 people and has hired 9,000 “over the last few years” in   
   data and tech roles. “There’s lots of new roles and skills we need and   
   we are investing in those,” said Nunn. “I think the real debate you’re   
      
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