Anthropic’s chief executive officer Dario Amodei said it is “possible, maybe even likely” that artificial intelligence could one day outperform humans at almost everything. This, he said, may not be limited to tasks done in data centres but may also extend to the physical world.
Speaking on the WTF podcast hosted by Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath, Amodei explained that while today’s AI systems mainly operate in virtual environments, building capable robots is ultimately a technical skill that can improve over time.
He further suggested that advanced AI could even help humans get better at designing the developing robotics. However, he described it as a gradual process. “We need to figure this out step-by-step and figure out how to adapt to it.
Amodei believes there’s always a need for human skill
The Anthropic boss cited real-world examples to explain how AI’s progress might unfold. “Geoff Hinton predicted that AI will replace radiologists,” he said, referring to the early claims that machine learning can replace human specialists in reading medical scans. “And indeed, AI has gotten better than radiologists at doing scans,” he added.
He noted that the impact hasn’t been as dramatic as some feared, at least not yet. “What happens today is, there aren’t fewer radiologists,” he said, adding how the nature of their job has changed due to technological advancement.
“What the radiologist does is, they walk the patient through the scan and they kind of talk to the patient. So, the most highly technical part of the job has gone away, but somehow there’s still some demand for the kind of underlying human skill,” he explained.
Looking ahead, he acknowledged that the future could bring further disruptions. “Now, that may not be true everywhere. And perhaps, over time, AI will advance in areas where it hasn’t yet advanced. And maybe that’ll happen fast,” he said.
Still, Amodei urged caution, arguing that “we should take it one step at a time. This is a very empirical observation. Let’s see what AI does today.”
Tech entrepreneurs bet big on AI
Amodei is not the only tech executive making big claims about AI’s capabilities and future advances. Previously, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that not only will general artificial intelligence surpass human capability in the very near future, but that there could be breakthroughs achievable only through AI, Business Insider reported.
Before OpenAI and Anthropic became rival companies, Dario Amodei worked at the ChatGPT maker’s office, where he joined as a team lead for AI safety in 2016.
He further said that “I would certainly say that by the end of this decade, by 2030, if we don’t have extraordinarily capable models that do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised.”
Meanwhile, just last month, Tesla and xAI chief Elon Musk also made similar claims. He said the pace of AI’s development was accelerating so quickly that it could become far more capable than any individual human could, emerging far sooner than many expect. He suggested this milestone could arrive as early as the end of this year, and almost certainly by 2031 at the latest, Mint reported earlier.
