From: user7160@newsgrouper.org.invalid   
      
   because billionaires don't have morals, and are slave to chasing what   
   they perceive as profit regardless of the effect of others   
      
   there's a reason rich people can't make it into heaven   
      
   cause we can't even build heaven when rich people exist   
      
   On 1/31/26 7:53 AM, 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.   
   >   
   > 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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)