People have been using all kinds of analogies for describing what the AI revolution will look like, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has another particularly evocative one.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that the emergence of AI will be like dropping in a new country of 10 million people, all smarter than the smartest human alive today. “ We’re on the eve of something that has great challenges, right? It’s going to greatly upend the balance of power. If someone dropped in a new country into the world — 10 million people smarter than any human alive today, you’d ask the question, what is their intent?” he said at an event.
“What are they actually going to do in the world? Particularly if they’re able to act autonomously. I think it’s unfortunate that there wasn’t more discussion of those issues,” he continued.
Amodei seemed to suggest that there isn’t enough focus on how AI will impact the world and all of humanity. Anthropic had been formed when its founders left OpenAI over differences in how to approach AI safety among other issues, and the company has been attempting to create AI that is safe as well as powerful. Anthropic had recently held a contest, challenging anyone to jailbreak its LLMs, and even offered a cash prize for people who were able to do so. Anthropic would’ve likely used the results of this exercise to further strengthen their safeguards to make sure that their LLMs couldn’t be used for harmful purposes.
And Amodei has made other similar predictions about how powerful AI systems are getting. He’s said that AI will lead to a century’s worth of scientific progress in 5-10 years, and AI systems better than humans at all tasks were just 2-3 years away. These pronouncements not only serve to indicate how fast AI is developing, but also show how urgent it might be to discuss AI safety. Other leading voices in AI have made evocative statements too — Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton has said that open-sourcing powerful AI models was like selling nuclear weapons at Radioshack. And with Amodei now saying that AI could lead to the creation of a new country of 10 million AI agents which are smarter than any human alive today, it might be the wake up call for tech labs, governments and regulatory bodies to make sure that this new “country” acts in the best interests of the rest of humanity.