AI has made some incredible progress over the last couple of years, but tech leaders seem to believe we might just be getting started.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic which builds the Claude series of AI models, has said that AI could accelerate scientific progress to such a degree that a century’s worth of innovation could happen in 5-10 years. He said that this will impact all aspects of our lives including health and medicine.
“If we get to the point where AI is past the professional level at most tasks, and we’re able to build millions of these systems, you could think of this as a country of geniuses (operating) in the data center. That’s a bizarre situation, right?” he said in an interview.
“Civilization has never been in that situation before. What happens when you just instantly invent everything that could be invented? (There could be a) bunch of reasons why (things don’t go that way). But what I do think could happen is (it does). If we look at the next hundred years of what we are trying to invent in science and engineering, perhaps all of that could happen in five or 10 years,” he said.
And Amodei himself has some experience of doing science to make that claim. “I used to be a biologist, I focused particularly on the biology side of things on biomedical discoveries, ranging from academics to biotech companies to large pharma companies. And I think there’s really potential to conquer many of the afflictions we still face,” he said.
“A lot of the easy, easy ones like, diseases we’re already addressed by sanitation or vaccination or antibiotics. But things like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease are much more complicated, and I’m wondering if AI is really what we need to understand that complexity and to surmount those diseases much faster than than I think most of us are imagining,” he added.
“We’re getting used to a world where those diseases are very hard to address and progress is very slow. I don’t think it needs to be that way. I think, I think if we get it right, these incurable diseases could be overcome. And we’ll look back at them the way we look back at bubonic plague or mumps,” he said.
It’s a remarkable pronouncement. If AI could produce 100 years of innovation in just a decade, it could lead to the most dramatic transformation in the lives of human beings since the dawn of time. Interestingly, many AI leaders seem to believe this is the trajectory we’re on — NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says that AI is moving much faster than even Moore’s law, and Microsoft is talking about advancements like infinite memory for LLMs. It remains to be seen how the future pans out, but the world’s top leaders are right, humanity could be in for a hell of a ride in the coming years.