Anthropic’s CEO believes that artificial intelligence will lead to utopia – it just needs a few billion dollars

If you want to raise ungodly amounts of money, you better have some godly reasons.

That’s what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says prepared for us on Friday in over 14,000 words: the out-of-this-world ways artificial general intelligence (AGI, though he prefers to call it “powerful AI”) will change our lives. On the blog entitled “The Grace-Loving Machine”, imagines a future in which artificial intelligence could compress 100 years of medical progress into a decade, cure mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, upload thoughts to the cloud, and alleviate poverty. At the same time, it is reported that Anthropic hopes to raise $40 billion in fresh funding.

Today’s artificial intelligence can do exactly none of what Amodei imagines. This will require, as he himself admits, calculations worth hundreds of billions of dollars to train AGI models built with trillion-dollar data centers that draw enough power from local power grids to keep the lights on in millions of homes. Not to mention that no one is 100% sure this is possible. Amodei himself says: “Of course, no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful artificial intelligence will likely be even more unpredictable than previous technological changes, so all of this will inevitably consist of guesswork.”

AI executives have mastered the art of making massive promises before mass fundraising. Take OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose Blog “The Age of Intelligence”. preceded a stunning $6.6 billion round. On Altman’s blog, he stated that the world would have superintelligence in “a few thousand days,” which would lead to “enormous prosperity.” It’s a compelling show: paint a utopian future, suggest solutions to humanity’s deepest fears – death, famine, poverty – and then argue that only by removing Some thanks to unnecessary guardrails and the infusion of unprecedented capital, we can achieve this techno-paradise. It’s brilliant marketing, exploiting our greatest hopes and fears while conveniently bypassing the need for concrete evidence.

The timing of this blog also highlights how fierce the competition is. As Amodei points out, a 14,000-word utopian manifesto is completely out of place for Anthropic. The company was founded after Amodei and others left OpenAI for security reasons, and has gained a reputation for sober risk assessment rather than staring futurism. That’s why the company continues to employ security researchers from OpenAI. Even in last week’s post, he urged Anthropic to prioritize candid discussions about the dangers of artificial intelligence over seductive visions of techno-utopia.

However, security is not an stimulating topic and fresh challengers appear every day. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever launched his own AI lab and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is leaving apparently it is starting your own venture. The Amodei blog isn’t just about selling your vision – it’s about staying competitive.

Despite his declared reluctance to make massive claims, he seems to thousands of words painting a future in which artificial intelligence could change the fate of humanity (this seems to fit Altman’s malice, which are legendary in tech circles). The post makes only one mention of alignment, or ensuring that AI systems operate in line with human values, and no mention of security. This contradiction exposes a stark truth: in the high-stakes world of AI development, even those who fear media hype are forced to play the game of massive promises to secure crucial funding.

Currently, there is an incredible gap between the capabilities of this technology and the utopia imagined by AI leaders. This has led to a lot of valid criticism – how will he change the world in just a few years if he can’t even reliably count the R number in the word “strawberry”? What artificial intelligence reliably excels at Now automates routine tasks and analyzes huge data sets, identifying patterns with ever greater precision. This power is already helping fields such as finance, medicine and autonomous vehicles. While these advances are impressive, claims like Amodei’s that AI can be “structurally conducive to democracy” seem premature and overly hopeful. It’s worth noting that AGI followers are wondering about his blog post be a little too tame (which Amodei predicted on his blog, writing in the footnotes that they should “touch the grass”).