The Adolescence of Technology

From the essay - not presented in agreement (I'm still undecided), but Dario's opinion is probably the most relevant here:

> My co-founders at Anthropic and I were among the first to document and track the “scaling 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 1–2 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 5 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.

I don't think we have much to worry about in terms of economic disruption. At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental.

Even in the software world, the effect of being able to build software a lot faster isn't really leading to a fundamentally different software landscape. Yes, you can now pump out a month's worth of CRUD in a couple days, but ultimately it's just the same CRUD, and there's no reason to expect that this will change because of LLMs.

Of course, creative people with innovative ideas will be able to achieve more, a talented engineer will be able to embark on a project that they didn't have the time to build before, and that will likely lead to some kind of software surplus that the economy feels on the margins, but in practical terms the economy will continue to chug along at a sustained pace that's mostly inline with e.g. economic projections from 10 years ago.

> Here's something Sonnet 4 did last year

Hate to be that gal but a lot has changed in the past year

Dario and Anthropic's strategy has been to exaggerate the harmful capabilities of LLMs and systems driven by LLMs, positioning Anthropic themselves as the "safest" option. Take from this what you will.

As an ordinary human with no investment in the game, I would not expect LLMs to magically work around the well-known physical phenomena that make submarines hard to track. I think there could be some ability to augment cybersecurity skill just through improved pattern-matching and search, hence real teams using it at Google and the like, but I don't think this translates well to attacks on real-world targets such as satellites or launch facilities. Maybe if someone hooked up Claude to a Ralph Wiggum loop and dumped cash into a prompt to try and "fire ze missiles", and it actually worked or got farther than the existing state-sponsored black-hat groups at doing the same thing to existing infrastructure, then I could be convinced otherwise.