Because I remember that you shared similar opinions about software where you cited liability as a limitation that for you precludes more autonomous use of AI.
I think it's safe to say that you have an entirely different expectation for how AI will progress and how it will be used, or at least that was my impression.
With the release of Fable 5.2, I have to say that you might be right. Maybe progress is already slowing down, it certainly isn't as big a step as I was hoping to see after Opus 5.5.
Shall we wait until that trajectory has run its course before we start claiming victory?
As for the rest of this discussion:
Medicine != computer science, math or physics. Biology isn't either. The degree of complexity is many orders of magnitude higher.
Curing cancer : very unlikely, cancer is a systemic issue that requires many mechanisms in the body to do its thing, most of which we also require to stay alive. Short of a massive breakthrough in nano technology curing cancer is stupendously hard and it would be proof of reaching an entirely different plateau of capabilities for Humanity as a whole. Besides that, it isn't cancer that kills the most people on the planet, it is hunger, and then climate change.
The second one: Curing mental illness. I think it is equally delusional to be able to claim that you can cure mental illness because mental illness is a very broad description, so broad that it covers a wide variety of issues with an even wider variety of root causes the bulk of which are not well understood. Our brains are hard to appreciate in terms of capabilities and it shouldn't be surprising that something so compact and so powerful can break. Whether you can repair it after it breaks is not something you can say with certainty in the present unless you can demonstrate structural progress in the field compared to where it was say five years ago. To the best of my knowledge this is not the case.
Finally, Alzheimers. This is another one of those 'too good to be true' things. Alzheimers is next to cancer one of the diseases that has been studied extensively without much progress as to both root causes and cures. That doesn't mean that we won't find one, but here too: you would have to show at least incremental progress and to show a number of very promising leads that we didn't have so far to be able to make this claim.
In short: this is a marketing ploy, these three were picked because they hit everybody, either directly or indirectly. What they are saying is 'imagine, if we had this AI that we are working on today the problems that affect you or your loved ones would no longer exist'. This kind of promise is known to open the wallets of the gullible.
It is also fraudulent.
Before I really change my mind, what would need to happen is little progress in AI until say March. Then I will really worry about progress slowing down and plateauing.
I am under the impression that Amodei sincerely believes in what he says, which has long been an acceleration of biomedical research to cure most major disease.
That he recently picked these specific diseases in order to essentially defraud investors is a large stretch.
In fact I think Amodei is making a massive mistake here: you can make these promises, but they will be remembered. And when you ultimately fail - which is highly likely - it will look like you oversold your IPO and that's actionable. AI already has plenty of potential without talking about curing cancer, mental illness or Alzheimers, those claims should come from the specialists in those fields using AI as a tool.
It's akin to IBM saying they're going to put all of the banks and insurance companies out of business in 1950. Yes, computers back then were seen as just as revolutionary as we see AI today. It did transform the world, I give you that. But IBM ended up as 'just another company' and I suspect that the same will hold for OpenAI and Anthropic for many different, mutually reinforcing reasons.
edit: to address your last line: I don't think it is a stretch at all: if you think it is, show me the proof, show concrete progress that Anthropic has made in any of those three fields that warrant these statements. If you can't then you'll have to concede they are highly speculative at best and that's not what you do when you are about to take public money.
When we talk about fraud, I think it's important that these clearly are not promises. In 2024 he specifically said: "Everything I’m saying could very easily be wrong".
His recent statements, including the one we see here in OP's video, say 'I believe' or 'I think', not that Anthropic claims to solve this by that deadline.
Perhaps he is overpromising or wildly speculating, sure, but I am not convinced that this is fraudulent or criminal at all; that said, I did not look into the legality of it.