Anthropic CEO's Bold Claim: AI Could Double Human Lifespan Within a Decade

Anthropic CEO says AI could double human lifespan within a decade

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. WTF?! Generative AI company executives have made plenty of bold promises about what their technologies can do, despite much of the general public's opinion of AI ranging from apathetic to hostile. But the CEO of Anthropic is trying to inflate AI's abilities by claiming it will help double human lifespans within five to ten years. Speaking during a panel titled "Technology in the World" at the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Anthropic's Dario Amoedi said, "If you think about what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in 100 years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy." That's a pretty big claim, but who's to say what could happen in the far future. However, Amoedi finished off his statement with a prediction that would generously be called audacious. "And then if AI is able to accelerate that, we may be able to get that in five to ten years." "So that's kind of the grand vision. At Anthropic, we are thinking about, you know, what's the first step towards that vision, right? If we're two or three years away from the enabling technologies for that." Amoedi has a Ph.D. in biophysics from Princeton and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford, so it's not as if he's inexperienced in this field, though he admitted that "this is not a very exact science." Being CEO of an AI company means Amoedi's always going to inflate the abilities of artificial intelligence for the sake of hype, of course. The average life expectancy in the US is 77.4 years (as of 2022). Finding ways to push that to almost 155 years before the end of 2030 is not going to happen, no matter how advanced your AI. Amoedi's predictions for when AIs will outperform humans are also ambitious. He believes that by 2026 or 2027, "we will have AI systems that are broadly better than almost all humans at almost all things." The Anthropic leader isn't alone in his belief that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which has the ability to learn, reason, and adapt across a wide range of tasks and is generally smarter than humans, will be here soon. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says it will be here by 2029, while SoftBank's CEO had given 2023 as a deadline. And earlier this month, OpenAI boss Sam Altman said he was confident his company can now build and deploy AGI. One person who will likely be excited by Amoedi's claims is Bryan Johnson. The millionaire, famed for his many attempts to reverse aging and extend his life, is the subject of a Netflix documentary, Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. He recently had to stop one of the 54 different supplements he takes every day as it was making him older, not younger.

Anthropic CEO Hilariously Claims AI Will Double Human Lifespans Within a Decade

Dario Amoedi also did a little hedging with his prediction, noting "this is not a very exact science." The future of artificial intelligence was a hot topic at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week. And while that's to be expected, given the huge sums of money at play now that Big Tech has staked its future on generative AI, there's also an air of desperation to some of the predictions coming out of the conference. As just one example, the CEO of AI company Anthropic claimed on Thursday that human lifespans would double within 5 to 10 years, all thanks to artificial intelligence. Dario Amoedi made the prediction during a Davos panel titled "Technology in the World," where the moderator noted that Amoedi seemed to have the most optimistic predictions for the speed at which the world would change as a result of AI deployment. "It is my guess that by 2026 or 2027, we will have AI systems that are broadly better than almost all humans at almost all things," Amoedi said. "I see a lot of positive potential." Amoedi said those changes would take place in areas like the military, workplace tech, self-driving cars, as well as biology and health -- the last topic being important because he believes it will lead to much longer lifespans. "If I had to guess, and you know, this is not a very exact science, my guess is that we can make 100 years of progress in areas like biology in five or ten years if we really get this AI stuff right," Amoedi said. "If you think about, you know, what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in 100 years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy. And then if AI is able to accelerate that, we may be able to get that in five to ten years," Amoedi continued. "So that's kind of the grand vision. At Anthropic, we are thinking about, you know, what's the first step towards that vision, right? If we're two or three years away from the enabling technologies for that." How realistic is this prediction? Well, Amoedi prefacing everything with "this is not a very exact science," should tell you everything you need to know. Doubling human lifespans in such a short period is laughable on just about every level, and you don't need to be an expert to understand why. As Gizmodo recently explained, only 3.1% of women and 1.3% of men born in 2019 are expected to reach the age of 100. Doubling human lifespans would mean regular Americans would be living to something like 160 years, several decades beyond the lifespan any person has ever achieved. Stuart Jay Olshansky, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, spoke with Gizmodo back in October about the limitations of technology to radically increase human lifespans. "There's a lot of money being invested in this right now. There's a lot of good science going on. There's also a lot of embellishments and exaggeration, which is something that we need to be cognizant of," said Olshanksy. "And I wish folks would stop exaggerating and telling people they're all gonna live to 100 or 120 or 150 -- these sorts of claims of radical life extension associated with any of these interventions." Olshansky and other researchers believe that while technology gets credit for the longer life expectancy we've seen in the past century, it could have a hard ceiling. But it's easy to see why rich people in the world of tech are so obsessed with living forever. Everyone dies, no matter how much money they have. And when wealthy guys like Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson realize that all the money in the world can't stop the inevitable, sometimes they go a little bonkers in their quest for eternal life. But who knows? AI has genuinely accomplished some neat magic tricks in recent years like AI generated videos, even if the thing that makes it possible is just plagiarism. And ChatGPT also shows off some neat tricks, even if it can't yet apply reasoning and logic like a human. Could tech companies use AI to change life in significant ways? Sure. But when it comes to doubling human lifespans, we'll believe it when we see it.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Believes A.I. Could Double Human Lifespans in 5 Years

Because "we can make 100 years of progress in areas like biology in five to ten years," the former OpenAI executive said at Davos this week. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has a Ph.D. in biophysics from Princeton and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford before entering Silicon Valley, believes advances in A.I. could soon enable humans to live twice as long. "If you think about what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in 100 years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy," he said yesterday (Jan. 23) while speaking at the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters He added that this vision could materialize as soon as 2030. "We can make 100 years of progress in areas like biology in five or ten years if we really get this A.I. stuff right," said Amodei. This isn't the first time Amodei has lauded A.I.'s potential in biology and health. He highlighted this optimism in a lengthy essay in October, noting that A.I. advances could eventually lead to progress in treating nearly all natural infectious diseases, eliminating most cancers, and creating effective cures for genetic diseases. Amodei said, in the past three to six months, he has become more and more confident that A.I. systems are progressing to eventually surpass humans at nearly all tasks -- a feat often thought of as a benchmark for artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.). His confidence in the technology's speed has been solidified by the introduction of models mirroring the capabilities of Ph.D. students in areas like math, programming and biology. "It is my guess that by 2026 or 2027, we will have A.I, systems that are broadly better than all humans at almost all things," he said. While claiming A.I. will enable acceleration across areas like health, military applications and the workplace, Amodei conceded that restrictions to rapid progress remain in place. "What's going to hold us back most in positive applications is the physical world and limits on human institutions," he said. For example, advancements in autonomous driving will be restrained by deployment cycles and laws. And A.I.'s pharmaceutical contributions will still need to undergo clinical trials, he added. Before founding Anthropic in 2020, Amodei was OpenAI's vice president of research. Anthropic has since emerged as one of OpenAI's strongest competitors. The startup is reportedly in talks for a funding round that would value the company at $60 billion. It recently received $1 billion in funding from Google (GOOGL), which previously invested $2 billion in the company, according to CNBC.

Anthropic CEO Sees AI-Powered Advances Doubling Human Lifespans | PYMNTS.com

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday (Jan. 23) that accelerated advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in biology, can lead to a doubling of human lifespans in as little as five to 10 years "if we really get this AI stuff right." During a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amodei called this the "grand vision." He explained that if AI today can shrink a century's worth of work in biology to five to 10 years, and if one believes it would take 100 years to double the average length of human life, then "a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy, and if AI is able to accelerate that we may be able to get that in five to 10 years." Amodei also said that Anthropic is working on a "virtual collaborator," an AI agent capable of doing higher-level tasks in the workplace such as opening Google Docs, using the Slack messaging channel, and interacting with workers. A manager will only need to check in with this AI agent "once in a while," similar to what management does with human employees. Amodei said that in the last three to six months, he has become "more confident" that "we really are heading towards AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks." He has seen some AI models starting to be as good as Ph.D. students in math, programming and biology. Amodei believes that by 2026 or 2027, "we will have AI systems that are broadly better almost all humans at almost all things." Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI engineers and backed principally by Amazon and Google. Anthropic differentiates itself from OpenAI, its chief rival, with its focus on constitutional AI that seeks to make the AI helpful and harmless. However, with all these smart and capable AI agents coming, "do we immediately solve all of the world's problems?" Amodei asked rhetorically. The implied answer is no. He said the two main hurdles to AI advancing rapidly, which one could currently see in the struggles to develop a fully self-driving car, is the physical world and bureaucracies from human institutions. Another example Amodei gave was in the realm of drug development. While AI can come up with solutions for drugs, they still need to go through clinical trials and get regulatory approval. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who was in the same panel, said AI is shrinking drug discovery timelines from years to months. But several steps are needed before these advances can directly benefit the public. For example, AI can help identify promising targets, but there are subsequent processes, such as the need to pair an antibody to a specific protein commonly found in cancer cells, and then arm it with a "warhead" to destroy only cancer cells, not healthy ones. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi acknowledged that for autonomous vehicles, the physical world remains a challenge that needs to be solved. For example, a defaced stop sign can still confuse a self-driving car, something that would not befuddle teen drivers. Khosrowshahi, however, remains bullish on autonomy. He sees electric, AI-driven vehicles as the future of transportation. He believes one day all vehicles on the road would coordinate with one another and alleviate congestion on the streets. Khosrowshahi also pointed to another challenge for autonomy: Lack of trust from the public. He said that it's easier for people to accept mistakes from other human beings but the AI needs to be 10 times better than humans for it to be trusted. Thus, while he believes self-driving cars are safer than human-driven vehicles, even a handful of accidents erodes public trust. As for bureaucratic red tape, Mark Rutte, secretary general of NATO, acknowledged that his institution can be "too slow" to innovate. Often, NATO would like to see a technology solution work nearly perfectly before rolling it out. But Rutte said that is a mistake: "Speed is of the essence." Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who was on the same panel as Amodei, observed that the crop of CEOs in Davos could be the last ones managing all-human workers, since AI agents are coming to the workplace. Fairly soon, managers will be working with human and digital workers. Salesforce itself offers Agentforce, which lets clients build and customize AI agents. Google President and CIO Ruth Porat, who was another panelist, said Google is already looking ahead to things like quantum computing. Last December, Google unveiled Willow, a quantum chip that can perform a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that it said would have taken one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion, or 10 followed by 24 zeros, years to solve. "We're already investing in where the world will be next," Porat said. Looking ahead, Amodei said he is concerned about AI's impact on political systems. Will it empower more democracy or more autocracy? "This is one of my deepest worries," Amodei confessed. "Is AI stabilizing for autocracies and destabilizing for democracies?" He wondered what would happen if China deploys 10 million super-smart AI agents. "What could they do in terms of a surveillance state? The power of dictatorships has traditionally been constrained by the need to have humans who carry out the will of the dictator. That has limited how terrible a dictatorship can be. "There is a chilling possibility that AI could remove some of those limits and make possible something like a '1984' (the novel about a dystopian society) or darker on the international stage," Amodei warned. "This is very serious, and I'm not sure it's going to go right." Google's Porat said that's why it's important for the West to stay ahead in AI development. This requires a pro-innovation regulatory environment for AI. Currently, she said the U.S. is ahead in AI models and chips advancements by about a year. But this could change. "We need to be bold and responsible, but we need to make sure we have the ability to maintain the lead." Porat also said U.S. companies must be engaged with foreign countries in their AI development. She said when she talks with heads of state, they all express interest in enabling AI in their countries. "But they're also very clear that in the absence of us being there ... they will partner elsewhere."