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I don't quite understand the intent of such article other than to promote themselves given an odd timing that the company is planning on going public, so I can

by jameson 4mo ago

I don't quite understand the intent of such article other than to promote themselves given an odd timing that the company is planning on going public, so I can only conclude that this is just part of the IPO roadshow. LLMs certainly have made significant changes to our lives, but I haven't yet to see any extraordinary improvement it brought to me which makes me skeptical about their claims. _if_ it solves many of our problems of great magnitude, why haven't Anthropic used it to solve significant problems we, humans, face? Cancer, Alzheimer's, education, finding new materials, fission power plant, etc.

yuhmahp 4mo ago
Agree with your point about the timing, but drawing anticipation before going ahead and solving these disease can be a good smoke test, would be beneficial even if there's an IPO or not
ElProlactin 4mo ago
Because they're going after the biggest problem of all first: labor costs. /s but not to a lot of people
- nostrebored 4mo ago
  Do you not think that the allocation of human time is one of the world’s biggest problems?
  - wood_spirit 4mo ago
    Reallocating human time is also going to cause problems. But it’s a great short term business opportunity for AI vendors and it was Anthropic who went all in on being knowledge worker outsourcing in a big way first whilst OpenAI thought they’d replace Google in search. I think Anthropic had the better business strategy.
  - spaceman_2020 4mo ago
    It’s a problem for capitalists, not the people themselves The people want cheaper prices, affordable housing, affordable healthcare Capitalism has decided that these problems aren’t worth solving. Instead, we must optimize for spam and slop (and call it “distribution”)
    - aswegs8 4mo ago
      I feel like one mental model here is that the attention is limited and under capitalism capital aggregates in the hands of few. Their attention is limited to things that immediately better their position, the most capital-efficient thing to do is to gather more capital. Cheaper prices, affordable housing, affordable healthcare are less capital-efficient. If you're Walmart, sure, you would like to lower prices as much as possible. But your leverage really isn't as big as finance or tech. If you're a politician, you might also pursue those goals, but your attention and leverage really isn't as focused as that of the money machine.
  - ElProlactin 4mo ago
    Honestly, not really. We can have a philosophical debate about work, the history of work and its relationship to human psychology in the 21st century but the bottom line is that there are 8+ billion people on the planet and, of those who are "working age", the vast majority of people, lacking meaningful capital, can only secure income by selling their time and labor. There's absolutely no evidence that if we come up with a way to "reallocate human time" and change the structure of our civilization (using AI of course) tomorrow, the masses would benefit. There's plenty of evidence that the people who control AI or have the capital to employ it will use it to accumulate as much power and wealth for themselves as they can.
    - cyanydeez 4mo ago
      theres also no evidence that any of the manual labor will benefit. we are nowhere near the type of scifi utopia that gives us replicator food. aside from capitalism moving money up and living condotions down, AI is going to accelerate the gap between rich and everyone else.
      - wordpad 4mo ago
        Starvation is already not a thing anymore.
        NackerHughes 4mo ago
        Then why are people starving?
        __patchbit__ 3mo ago
        Israel is starving 2 million plus people by collective punishment area access denial and the blackmarket for food trades USD$250 for a dozen eggs.
        throw394689 3mo ago
        This is not true. As of Jan 2026 the price of eggs in Gaza is 25 Shekels for 30 eggs: https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/WFP-Palestine-Food-Security-Analysis.pdf https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/WFP-Pa... You’re just repeating old outdated bits of propaganda. Also, nice that you’re estimating that there’s been no decline in population size over the past 3 years. At least you slipped a bit of truth out in an attempt to demonize them.
  - ezconnect 4mo ago
    For the Capitalist crowd, YES it is the biggest cost. The next is energy. Imagine a world where your research and development is all AI and the production is all automated by robots. Instant product to sell to the masses who has no money because no one is working.
    - TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
      In the future a few thousand billionaire geniuses will own a world of unimaginable luxury and near-infinite longevity. They will make the decisions, AI will execute them, and robots will do the physical work. Everyone else will be reduced to compost. It's the perfect plan. The final definitive justification for capitalism. The masses are unnecessary. The masses will be optimised. What could possibly go wrong?
      - ahtihn 4mo ago
        Why do billionaires keep working, keep amassing more money, donate to politicians, buy media companies? They want influence and power. Being at the top of a hierarchy of millions, billions of people. If there are no massess the 1000th billionaire will be a the bottom of the hierarchy instead of near the top. They don't want that. The masses are needed to give them the sense of power. What these people want is power and control. Eliminating the masses goes against that.
        bigbuppo 4mo ago
        They now have the AI that gives them the praise they want. We have been made redundant.
        timacles 4mo ago
        I don’t think that’s it. I think the only thing that motivates billionaire is just to have more than the next guy. The only thing that motivates Bezos is that Elon Musk’s has more and conversely Elon Musk would have a existential crisis if he was no longer number one
      - jpadkins 4mo ago
  - UncleMeat 4mo ago
    We can’t reallocate time unless there is an alternative source of income. But all these companies just want to extract wealth, not distribute it.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
aroman 4mo ago
The article does not claim they have achieved recursive self improvement... just that it appears to be a plausible outcome given the progress of AI development in the past few years. I don't know about you, but AI advancements have brought extraordinary improvements to me personally in my ability to be productive, in much the same ways the article outlines. I find it deeply satisfying to be able to "get ideas out of my head" faster and tackle more meaningful problems. FWIW, it deeply concerns me how much power and capability is being centralized in the hands of so few, especially Anthropic. I, for one, hope these advancements can be scaled down to something I can have full sovereignty over and trust... in my own home.
sothatsit 4mo ago
Or: Anthropic genuinely believes the future scenarios they outline are realistic possibilities, and they want more people to take them seriously.
- zelphirkalt 4mo ago
  I find this version unlikely, since companies very rarely genuinely believe what they preach in PR campaigns. It's always some sales and marketting dudes and gals trying to polish up something as something more than it is. Which is very annoying. We can now choose between Anthropic being the one exception to this, while having huuuuge incentive to hype up their product, or we just write it off as more marketting fluff.
  - justanotherjoe 4mo ago
    Dario is no John hammond though. That'd be altman. He actually has the discipline and background as an ai scientist to tell what the potential failure modes are. You're right, he might still be just hyping things up, but generally i'd give more benefit of doubts to anthropic. Precisely because Dario was a scientist and I'd stand by it. People who get their phd in science already self-select, or proven at least to be made of different stuff. Likewise, people don't as easily blame ilya for 'hyping things up' when he said these things. Also talk about incentives, there are also incentives to lower their valuation. If you wanna be vigilant against social engineering i'd be wary of that too. These are moot anyway though cause the article isnt even making any super strong claim. If you read it it's no big deal
  - sothatsit 4mo ago
    I would be very surprised if this is an actual thought-out PR strategy. I am far more inclined to believe that their employees are just bought-in to the future where AI is genuinely transformative. Whether they are right of wrong is another matter, but their claims also don’t seem too far out of the realm of possibility to me. Coding agents have fundamentally changed my day-to-day job. In the last year, my work has shifted from me writing all of my code, to me writing very little code and spending most of my time on understanding problems better and setting direction, and reviewing, verifying, and polishing the output of coding agents. It has been quite a drastic change. It is not that outlandish to suggest that coding agents could continue to improve at such a drastic rate over the next year. And the implications of that could be quite large! Even just the implications of more white-collar workers adopting tools like Cowork seems potentially very large, with tools that already exist today. It seems sensible to at least consider this as a possibility.
sirsinsalot 4mo ago
Truly feels like witnessing the worst of capitalism and greed play out. All that compute and energy towards a narrative of reducing the need for skilled programmers. What a waste. These people don't have our interests in mind and everyone eats it up like a blessing from a god or something. It's surreal.
- aswegs8 4mo ago
  It's our collective God complex playing out and eating us up
- redbluered 4mo ago
  I think these people do have our interests at heart, but that's largely irrelevant. Their point is that capitalist free markets don't let them act on that. Capitalism and democracy are becoming obsolete. It's not clear what's next.
trolleski 4mo ago
The benefits of AI are not designed to suit you, but the owner class. The plan is for you to be sidelined.
sterlind 4mo ago
two reasons: 1. Anthropic is an AI company. they want to get to AGI before anyone else ~~so they can lock the doors behind them~~ to ensure the supremacy of an aligned AGI that serves humankind. RSI unlocks the most value for them. 2. doing bioscience is slow and capital intensive. robotics lags way behind, so that's a lot of lab techs swishing flasks and plating petri dishes. they're happy to stay in silico, but there's very little productive research you can do without in vivo/in vitro experiments.
b3nji 4mo ago
Because shush, that's why!
stevenhuang 3mo ago
It starts somewhere, like with this announcement. I'm not sure why this is so difficult for you to understand.

by jameson 4mo ago

yuhmahp 4mo ago

Agree with your point about the timing, but drawing anticipation before going ahead and solving these disease can be a good smoke test, would be beneficial even if there's an IPO or not

ElProlactin 4mo ago

Because they're going after the biggest problem of all first: labor costs. /s but not to a lot of people

nostrebored 4mo ago
Do you not think that the allocation of human time is one of the world’s biggest problems?
- wood_spirit 4mo ago
  Reallocating human time is also going to cause problems. But it’s a great short term business opportunity for AI vendors and it was Anthropic who went all in on being knowledge worker outsourcing in a big way first whilst OpenAI thought they’d replace Google in search. I think Anthropic had the better business strategy.
- spaceman_2020 4mo ago
  It’s a problem for capitalists, not the people themselves The people want cheaper prices, affordable housing, affordable healthcare Capitalism has decided that these problems aren’t worth solving. Instead, we must optimize for spam and slop (and call it “distribution”)
  - aswegs8 4mo ago
    I feel like one mental model here is that the attention is limited and under capitalism capital aggregates in the hands of few. Their attention is limited to things that immediately better their position, the most capital-efficient thing to do is to gather more capital. Cheaper prices, affordable housing, affordable healthcare are less capital-efficient. If you're Walmart, sure, you would like to lower prices as much as possible. But your leverage really isn't as big as finance or tech. If you're a politician, you might also pursue those goals, but your attention and leverage really isn't as focused as that of the money machine.
- ElProlactin 4mo ago
  Honestly, not really. We can have a philosophical debate about work, the history of work and its relationship to human psychology in the 21st century but the bottom line is that there are 8+ billion people on the planet and, of those who are "working age", the vast majority of people, lacking meaningful capital, can only secure income by selling their time and labor. There's absolutely no evidence that if we come up with a way to "reallocate human time" and change the structure of our civilization (using AI of course) tomorrow, the masses would benefit. There's plenty of evidence that the people who control AI or have the capital to employ it will use it to accumulate as much power and wealth for themselves as they can.
  - cyanydeez 4mo ago
    theres also no evidence that any of the manual labor will benefit. we are nowhere near the type of scifi utopia that gives us replicator food. aside from capitalism moving money up and living condotions down, AI is going to accelerate the gap between rich and everyone else.
    - wordpad 4mo ago
      Starvation is already not a thing anymore.
      - NackerHughes 4mo ago
        Then why are people starving?
        __patchbit__ 3mo ago
        Israel is starving 2 million plus people by collective punishment area access denial and the blackmarket for food trades USD$250 for a dozen eggs.
        throw394689 3mo ago
        This is not true. As of Jan 2026 the price of eggs in Gaza is 25 Shekels for 30 eggs: https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/WFP-Palestine-Food-Security-Analysis.pdf https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/WFP-Pa... You’re just repeating old outdated bits of propaganda. Also, nice that you’re estimating that there’s been no decline in population size over the past 3 years. At least you slipped a bit of truth out in an attempt to demonize them.
- ezconnect 4mo ago
  For the Capitalist crowd, YES it is the biggest cost. The next is energy. Imagine a world where your research and development is all AI and the production is all automated by robots. Instant product to sell to the masses who has no money because no one is working.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
    In the future a few thousand billionaire geniuses will own a world of unimaginable luxury and near-infinite longevity. They will make the decisions, AI will execute them, and robots will do the physical work. Everyone else will be reduced to compost. It's the perfect plan. The final definitive justification for capitalism. The masses are unnecessary. The masses will be optimised. What could possibly go wrong?
    - ahtihn 4mo ago
      Why do billionaires keep working, keep amassing more money, donate to politicians, buy media companies? They want influence and power. Being at the top of a hierarchy of millions, billions of people. If there are no massess the 1000th billionaire will be a the bottom of the hierarchy instead of near the top. They don't want that. The masses are needed to give them the sense of power. What these people want is power and control. Eliminating the masses goes against that.
      - bigbuppo 4mo ago
        They now have the AI that gives them the praise they want. We have been made redundant.
      - timacles 4mo ago
        I don’t think that’s it. I think the only thing that motivates billionaire is just to have more than the next guy. The only thing that motivates Bezos is that Elon Musk’s has more and conversely Elon Musk would have a existential crisis if he was no longer number one
    - jpadkins 4mo ago
- UncleMeat 4mo ago
  We can’t reallocate time unless there is an alternative source of income. But all these companies just want to extract wealth, not distribute it.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

aroman 4mo ago

The article does not claim they have achieved recursive self improvement... just that it appears to be a plausible outcome given the progress of AI development in the past few years. I don't know about you, but AI advancements have brought extraordinary improvements to me personally in my ability to be productive, in much the same ways the article outlines. I find it deeply satisfying to be able to "get ideas out of my head" faster and tackle more meaningful problems. FWIW, it deeply concerns me how much power and capability is being centralized in the hands of so few, especially Anthropic. I, for one, hope these advancements can be scaled down to something I can have full sovereignty over and trust... in my own home.

sothatsit 4mo ago

Or: Anthropic genuinely believes the future scenarios they outline are realistic possibilities, and they want more people to take them seriously.

zelphirkalt 4mo ago
I find this version unlikely, since companies very rarely genuinely believe what they preach in PR campaigns. It's always some sales and marketting dudes and gals trying to polish up something as something more than it is. Which is very annoying. We can now choose between Anthropic being the one exception to this, while having huuuuge incentive to hype up their product, or we just write it off as more marketting fluff.
- justanotherjoe 4mo ago
  Dario is no John hammond though. That'd be altman. He actually has the discipline and background as an ai scientist to tell what the potential failure modes are. You're right, he might still be just hyping things up, but generally i'd give more benefit of doubts to anthropic. Precisely because Dario was a scientist and I'd stand by it. People who get their phd in science already self-select, or proven at least to be made of different stuff. Likewise, people don't as easily blame ilya for 'hyping things up' when he said these things. Also talk about incentives, there are also incentives to lower their valuation. If you wanna be vigilant against social engineering i'd be wary of that too. These are moot anyway though cause the article isnt even making any super strong claim. If you read it it's no big deal
- sothatsit 4mo ago
  I would be very surprised if this is an actual thought-out PR strategy. I am far more inclined to believe that their employees are just bought-in to the future where AI is genuinely transformative. Whether they are right of wrong is another matter, but their claims also don’t seem too far out of the realm of possibility to me. Coding agents have fundamentally changed my day-to-day job. In the last year, my work has shifted from me writing all of my code, to me writing very little code and spending most of my time on understanding problems better and setting direction, and reviewing, verifying, and polishing the output of coding agents. It has been quite a drastic change. It is not that outlandish to suggest that coding agents could continue to improve at such a drastic rate over the next year. And the implications of that could be quite large! Even just the implications of more white-collar workers adopting tools like Cowork seems potentially very large, with tools that already exist today. It seems sensible to at least consider this as a possibility.

sirsinsalot 4mo ago

Truly feels like witnessing the worst of capitalism and greed play out. All that compute and energy towards a narrative of reducing the need for skilled programmers. What a waste. These people don't have our interests in mind and everyone eats it up like a blessing from a god or something. It's surreal.

aswegs8 4mo ago
It's our collective God complex playing out and eating us up
redbluered 4mo ago
I think these people do have our interests at heart, but that's largely irrelevant. Their point is that capitalist free markets don't let them act on that. Capitalism and democracy are becoming obsolete. It's not clear what's next.

trolleski 4mo ago

The benefits of AI are not designed to suit you, but the owner class. The plan is for you to be sidelined.

sterlind 4mo ago

two reasons: 1. Anthropic is an AI company. they want to get to AGI before anyone else ~~so they can lock the doors behind them~~ to ensure the supremacy of an aligned AGI that serves humankind. RSI unlocks the most value for them. 2. doing bioscience is slow and capital intensive. robotics lags way behind, so that's a lot of lab techs swishing flasks and plating petri dishes. they're happy to stay in silico, but there's very little productive research you can do without in vivo/in vitro experiments.

b3nji 4mo ago

Because shush, that's why!

stevenhuang 3mo ago

It starts somewhere, like with this announcement. I'm not sure why this is so difficult for you to understand.