Monday AI Brief #13
We’ve got lots to say about the future this week. Matt Shumer says what happened to coding last year will happen to everything else this year, and Dario Amodei still expects a country of geniuses in a data center by 2028. Steve Newman thinks the frenzy over OpenClaw gives us a peek into the future. And on the topic of predictions, AI is close to beating the best humans in forecasting tournaments.
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My writing
Ads, Incentives, and Destiny. OpenAI has started showing ads in some tiers of ChatGPT. They’re fine for now, but I worry about where those incentives lead.
Something Big Is Happening
Matt Shumer’s Something Big Is Happening has been making the rounds this week. It’s a great “you need to wake up” piece for anyone you know who doesn’t understand the magnitude of what’s happening right now.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.
We Just Got a Peek at How Crazy a World With AI Agents May Be
Now that the frenzy over OpenClaw and Moltbook has died down, Steve Newman takes a look at what just happened (not all that much, actually) and what it means (a sneak peek at some aspects of the future).
Dwarkesh Patel talks with Dario Amodei
Dwarkesh and Dario are both great, and this piece is well worth two and a half hours (or less, if you read the transcript). They cover exponential growth in capabilities, job loss, the economics of running a frontier lab, and the timeline to the fabled country of geniuses in a data center. Zvi analysis is also good.
AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making Predictions
AI is getting very good at almost everything, including complex cognitive tasks that require deep understanding and judgment. The Atlantic reports on AI forecasters at recent Metaculus tournaments ($):
Like other participants, the Mantic AI had to answer 60 questions by assigning probabilities to certain outcomes. The AI had to guess how the battle lines in Ukraine would shift. It had to pick the winner of the Tour de France and estimate Superman’s global box-office gross during its opening weekend. It had to say whether China would ban the export of a rare earth element, and predict whether a major hurricane would strike the Atlantic coast before September. […]
The AI placed eighth out of more than 500 entrants, a new record for a bot.
Claude finds 500 high-severity 0-day vulnerabilities
In a convincing demonstration of AI’s ability to find vulnerabilities at scale, Anthropic uses Opus 4.6 to find more than 500 high-severity zero day vulnerabilities. The accomplishment is impressive, and the account of how it went about finding them is very interesting. If you’re wondering why both OpenAI and Anthropic believe they’re reaching High levels of cyber capabilities, this is why.
The many masks LLMs wear
One of the big surprises of the LLM era has been how strangely human-like AI can be. (The frequent occasions when it’s shockingly un-humanlike are perhaps stranger but less surprising). Kai Williams at Understanding AI explores character and personality in LLMs.