Anthropic co-founder says AI might kill us all right after winning a Nobel Prize
Anthropic's co-founder went to Oxford to tell everyone we still have a "non-zero" chance of extinction. But hey, before the apocalypse, AI will allegedly win a Nobel, run million-dollar firms, and help your plumber. Conveniently, their valuation just hit $900B.
During a recent lecture at Oxford, Anthropic's co-founder Jack Clark laid out a timeline that sounds like a sci-fi fever dream, starting with AI co-authoring a Nobel-winning discovery within the next 12 months.
By late 2027, Clark expects the first fully autonomous, AI-run businesses to pull in millions of dollars without a single human on the payroll. Just a few months later, humanoid robots are supposedly going to start assisting plumbers and electricians with actual physical labor on-site.
The real kicker comes by the end of 2028, when AI models are predicted to start training their own successors, completely cutting humans out of the evolutionary loop. Naturally, throughout this entire timeline, Clark insists there remains a "non-zero chance" of total human extinction, comparing our current lack of AI safety preparation to the global failure of handling COVID-19.
What makes this doomsday prophecy truly fascinating is Clark's sudden moment of honesty regarding Anthropic's business model. When confronted with the popular accusation that his company hypes up existential dread just to scare regulators into crushing their competitors, Clark actually admitted there is "a grain of truth" to it.
This casual confession of using apocalypse-hype as a marketing strategy comes at a very convenient time for the company. Anthropic just projected its first-ever operating profit of $559 million on a massive $10.9 billion in revenue, pushing its valuation past $900 billion and overtaking OpenAI, all while onboarding industry legend Andrej Karpathy.
It turns out that warning the world about the end of days is actually the most profitable business model of the decade. As long as the checks keep clearing and the valuation keeps climbing, a little existential dread seems like a small price to pay for corporate supremacy.
Source: Time
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