Kylie Robison at The Verge:
[Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei] envisions a future where AI could compress 100 years of medical progress into a decade, cure mental illnesses like PTSD and depression, upload your mind to the cloud, and alleviate poverty. At the same time, it’s reported that Anthropic is hoping to raise fresh funds at a $40 billion valuation. Today’s AI can do exactly none of what Amodei imagines. It will take, by his own admission, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of compute to train AGI models, built with trillions of dollars worth of data centers, drawing enough energy from local power grids to keep the lights on for millions of homes.
If that doesn’t sound utterly bonkers instantly to anyone, it’s because Amodei isn’t the only one lately to make such bizarre claims:
AI execs have mastered the art of grand promises before massive fundraising. Take OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose “The Intelligence Age” blog preceded a staggering $6.6 billion round. In Altman’s blog, he stated that the world will have superintelligence in “a few thousand days” and that this will lead to “massive prosperity.” It’s a persuasive performance: paint a utopian future, hint at solutions to humanity’s deepest fears—death, hunger, poverty—then argue that only by removing some redundant guardrails and pouring in unprecedented capital can we achieve this techno-paradise.
But, of course, there are precedents:
For all of AI’s novelty, tech titans have long peddled their innovations as world-saving solutions. Mark Zuckerberg pitched the universal internet as a poverty cure. Brin once stated that Google could “cure death.” Musk framed SpaceX’s interplanetary ambitions as the ultimate backup plan for our species (and more recently, an imperative to vote for Donald Trump). But when there’s a finite amount of investor money going around, altruism is a zero-sum game. As a tech mogul in Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley famously put it, “I don’t wanna live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place than we do.”
Also, don’t get me started on Eric Schmidt.
What Altman, Amodei, and all these people have in common is the strategy of making such titanically outlandish claims that the media’s and many people’s cognitive apparatus simply shuts down because it refuses to compute that someone would or could just make all this grotesque shit up.
What all this is, purely and simply, is snake oil fraud, cargo cult, and Naherwartung all rolled up into one powerful socio-anabolic steroids shot.