AI will help make a Nobel prize-winning discovery within a year, says Anthropic co-founder

Key points

• An AI system will work with humans to make a Nobel prize-winning discovery within 12 months and tradespeople will be helped by bipedal robots in two years, according to the co-founder of Anthropic.
• Jack Clark described a “vertiginous sense of progress” in the technology and made a series of predictions, including that companies run solely by AIs would be generating millions of dollars in revenue within 18 months, and that by the end of 2028, AI systems would be able to design their own successors.
• In a lecture at Oxford University on Wednesday, he also said there remained plausible scenarios in which the technology had “a non-zero chance of killing everyone on the planet” and that it was “important to clearly state that that risk hasn’t gone away”.
• Anthropic’s most popular model is called Claude, but it recently launched a version called Mythos that proved alarmingly capable at exploiting cybersecurity...