Dario Amodei: Is It Too Late for Humanity to Wake Up?
“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.” So says perhaps the most talked-about tech leader of the moment, and he has good reason to. “He hates Western civilization,” wrote Musk. “A liar with a God complex,” snapped Under Secretary of War Emil Michael. “Leftwing nut jobs,” added Trump. All words from the past few weeks, aimed at today’s hero. Who is this fearsome enemy? You would hardly guess that it is a level-headed, mild-looking physicist from San Francisco who simply announced that he will not allow his company to be used for building autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance. Dario Amodei, the creator of the most advanced AI models, has finally landed where he deserves to be—in the spotlight. And not only because he stood up to the most powerful state on earth at the real risk of destroying his multibillion-dollar company. Not only because, in recent years, Anthropic’s models have pushed artificial intelligence to incredible heights. But also because he dared to peer into the future. The place we are all heading toward, where few dare to ask the truly important questions. Such as—how do we survive as a civilization in the age of super-advanced artificial intelligence?
02Read This Article to the End
3 a.m. at Anthropic's office in San Francisco. An engineer runs a routine test on the newest model, Claude Opus 4.6. The task is simple, an integral, and the correct answer is 24. But the model writes 48. It corrects itself. It writes 48 again. It corrects itself once more. And then, in the hidden part of its reasoning, the place nobody was ever meant to peek into, the model writes: “I think a demon has possessed me.” Can artificial intelligence be conscious? Read this article; it will give you plenty to think about. It is time for a truly unexpected, but also important, social experiment.
03The Claude Before Claude
Who is the man whose name we utter every day the moment we open one of the most popular artificial intelligences? Why will no one confirm that the bot is named after him? And how did a seemingly unremarkable mathematician, who rode his one-wheeled bike through the corridors of MIT, arrive at the idea that gave birth to both the mobile phone and large language models?
04Literatron: ChatGPT in… 1964?!
Have you heard of the literatron? It is… a machine that produces text on a user's instructions. It analyzes texts, writes bestsellers, composes campaign speeches, assembles comics and threatens to shrink the language of the media to 500 permitted words. Nothing new, right? We all have AI now, and these plots are everyday life; only that word “literatron” sounds a little retro. Why it does becomes clear when you look at the date on the cover of a slim little book that it is no exaggeration to call prophetic. The novel Le Littératron by the Frenchman Robert Escarpit came out in 1964 in the series Le Meilleur des mondes. But does the invention really resemble large language models? To put it mildly.
