AI will help make a Nobel prize-winning discovery within a year, says Anthropic co-founder

An AI system is expected to collaborate with humans to achieve a Nobel prize-winning discovery within 12 months, while bipedal robots are predicted to assist tradespeople within two years. Companies run solely by AI are projected to generate millions of dollars in revenue within 18 months. By the end of 2028, AI systems may be able to design their own successors. Plausible scenarios remain in which the technology could kill everyone on the planet, so the risk is not considered eliminated. Humans are advised to slow development to gain time, but development is unlikely to slow due to intense competition among companies and countries, where commercial and geopolitical rivalries dominate existential considerations.

"An AI system will work with humans to make a Nobel prize-winning discovery within 12 months and tradespeople will be helped by bipedal robots in two years, according to the co-founder of Anthropic. Jack Clark described a vertiginous sense of progress in the technology and made a series of predictions, including that companies run solely by AIs would be generating millions of dollars in revenue within 18 months, and that by the end of 2028, AI systems would be able to design their own successors."

"In a lecture at Oxford University on Wednesday, he also said there remained plausible scenarios in which the technology had a non-zero chance of killing everyone on the planet and that it was important to clearly state that that risk hasn't gone away. Clark told students it would be better if humans could slow the development of the technology to give ourselves more time as a species to deal with the implications of its powers."

"But he said this wouldn't happen, in the breakneck development by a variety of actors and a variety of countries, locked in a competition with one another, where commercial and geopolitical rivalries are often drowning out the larger existential-to-the-species aspects of the technology being built. This was not ideal, he said. Jack Clark said he wanted to encourage humanity to prepare for a technology that would soon be more capable than all of us collectively'."

"Anthropic's most popular model is called Claude, but it recently launched a version called Mythos that proved alarmingly capable at exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses. Clark is one of the most senior figures at Anthropic, which was established by AI researchers who quit the rival firm OpenAI over disagreements on safety. The $900bn company has been accused by Donald Trump's White House and other AI accelerationists of fear-mongering to encourage regulation that could cement its competitive position."

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