Dario Amodei

Exactly when powerful AI will arrive is a complex topic that deserves an essay of its own, but for now I'll simply explain very briefly why I think there's a strong chance it could be very soon.

My co-founders at Anthropic and I were among the first to document and track the descaling laws of AI systems.

The observation that as we add more compute and training tasks, AI systems get predictably better at essentially every cognitive skill we are able to measure.

Every few months, public sentiment either becomes convinced that AI is hitting a wall or becomes excited about some new breakthrough that will fundamentally change the game.

But the truth is that behind the volatility and public speculation,

there has been a smooth, unyielding increase in AI's cognitive capabilities.

We are now at the point where AI models are beginning to make progress in solving unsolved mathematical problems and are good enough at coding that some of the strongest engineers I've ever met are now handing over almost all their coding to AI.

Three years ago, AI struggled with elementary school arithmetic problems and was barely capable of writing a single line of code.

Similar rates of improvement are occurring across biological science, finance, physics, and a variety of agentic tasks.

If the exponential continues, which is not certain but now has a decade-long track record supporting it, then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.

In fact, that picture probably underestimates the likely rate of progress.

Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems.

This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month and may be only one to two years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.

This loop has already started and will accelerate rapidly in the coming months and years.

Watching the last five years of progress from within Anthropic and looking at how even the next few months of models are shaping up, I can feel the pace of progress and the clock ticking down.

In this essay, I'll assume that this intuition is at least somewhat correct, not that powerful AI is definitely coming in one to two years.

But that there's a decent chance it does, and a very strong chance it comes in the next few.

As with machines of loving grace, taking this premise seriously can lead to some surprising and eerie conclusions.

While in Machines of Loving Grace I focused on the positive implications of this premise, here the things I talk about will be disquieting.

They are conclusions that we may not want to confront, but that does not make them any less real.