Advances in artificial intelligence to “human levels” could arrive as soon as 2026, according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Speaking to podcaster Lex Fridman this week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei compared the recent advances in artificial general intelligence (AGI) to different levels of education. 

“We’re starting to get to PhD level, and last year we were at the undergraduate level, and the year before, the level of a high school student,” he said before predicting that AI could exceed human capabilities within the next couple of years. 

“If you just eyeball the rate at which these capabilities are increasing, it does make you think that we’ll get there by 2026 or 2027.” 

He added that several things could derail these advancements, such as running out of data, cluster scaling limitations, or geopolitical conflicts impacting microchip production. 

However, “if you believe the straight line extrapolation” of current advancement rates, “we’ll get there in 2026 or 2027,” though there might be some “mild delay” relative to that, he said. 

Dario Amodei. Source: YouTube

Amodei also expressed concern about the potential implications of human-level AI, stating, “Things that are powerful can do good things, and they can do bad things,” before adding, “With great power comes great responsibility.” 

Anthropic’s flagship product is the large language model chatbot Claude, which rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT, among others. 

When asked about the competition, he reiterated the company’s “race to the top” mission, which involved “trying to push the other players to do the right thing by setting an example.” 

When Fridman asked when the next iteration of the firm’s AI chatbot, Claude Opus 3.5, was coming out, Amodei remained elusive and didn’t give an exact date.  

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made similar predictions regarding the arrival of artificial general intelligence within a year or two. He recently indicated that the firm was on track to achieve AGI within the next five years with current hardware, according to reports. 

AGI is defined as a type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. 

Magazine: A bizarre cult is growing around AI-created memecoin ‘religions’: AI Eye