Anthropic CEO says AI growth is exponential. Anthropic research says otherwise.
Dario Amodei, CEO and founder of Anthropic, just published an online essay that starts out by comparing AI to the Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. And that may not be the only piece of fiction in it, if the system card from Anthropic’s own Claude Mythos model is to be believed. “The intersection of AI and our political institutions feels a bit like the Hobbits and Treebeard,” Amodei writes — that is, Treebeard the Ent moves so slow that he can’t even understand the speedy Hobbits. But then Amodei pivots to a controversial assertion — one that, to continue the Lord of the Rings analogy, would mean that Hobbits are moving exponentially faster all the time. “AI’s scaling laws, which predict an exponential increase in general cognitive capabilities with increasing computing power, now have over a decade of empirical evidence behind them,” Amodei claims. “If these scaling laws continue for only a year or two longer, we are likely to get what I’ve called Powerful AI.” It’s hardly a one-off reference; Amodei, who …
