Anthropic CEO predicts AI utopia

PLUS: Apple says LLMs don't reason

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

A century of scientific progress in just a decade? That’s the promise of AI, according to one industry titan.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just dropped an essay forecasting a bright future where AI transforms everything — but how accurate is his prediction? Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic CEO drops essay on AI and the future

  • OpenAI unveils Swarm multi-agent framework

  • Plan a month of social media posts with AI

  • Apple: ‘No evidence of formal reasoning’ in LLMs

  • 5 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs

  • More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

Image source: Dario Amodei

The Rundown: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just published a lengthy essay outlining an optimistic vision for how AI could transform society within 5-10 years of achieving human-level capabilities, touching on longevity, politics, work, the economy, and more.

The details:

  • Amodei believes that by 2026, ‘powerful AI’ smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across fields, with agentic and all multimodal capabilities, will be possible.

  • He also predicted that AI could compress 100 years of scientific progress into 10 years, curing most diseases and doubling the human lifespan.

  • The essay argued AI could strengthen democracy by countering misinformation and providing tools to undermine authoritarian regimes.

  • The CEO acknowledged potential downsides, including job displacement — but believes new economic models will emerge to address this.

  • He envisions AI driving unprecedented economic growth but emphasizes ensuring AI's benefits are broadly distributed.

Why it matters: As the CEO of what is seen as the ‘safety-focused’ AI lab, Amodei paints a utopia-level optimistic view of where AI will head over the next decade. This thought-provoking essay serves as both a roadmap for AI’s potential and a call to action to ensure the responsible development of technology.

TOGETHER WITH DYNAMIQ

The Rundown: Dynamiq is a comprehensive on-premise platform that enables you to build scalable and secure generative AI applications in hours.

With Dynamiq, you can:

  • Utilize LLMs with an air-gapped solution for unparalleled data security

  • Create GenAI apps with any LLM provider thanks to a vendor-agnostic approach

  • Orchestrate single-agent and multi-agent environments to perform tasks autonomously

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OPENAI

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just introduced Swarm, a new open-source experimental framework designed to simplify the creation and control of multi-agent AI systems.

The details:

  • Swarm focuses on making agent coordination lightweight, controllable, and easily testable through two key building blocks: agents and handoffs.

  • Agents encapsulate specific instructions and tools, while handoffs allow agents to transfer control of a conversation to another agent.

  • Swarm includes features like function calls, context variables, and streaming and is built on OpenAI’s ChatCompletions API.

  • The framework is available on GitHub with several examples, including a triage agent, weather agent, and airline customer service system.

  • OpenAI emphasized that Swarm is experimental and released as an educational resource for exploring multi-agent orchestration.

Why it matters: Not only are singular agentic capabilities inching closer — but the ability to deploy systems that leverage armies of agents working together is also coming fast. Soon, the user will be the CEO of their AI company — with dozens of agents autonomously working together on complex, multi-step tasks.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: Use ChatGPT to generate a strategic content plan for an entire month of social media posts.

Step-by-step:

  1. Provide ChatGPT with key info about your brand, target audience, and content goals.

  2. Ask it to create 8-10 content themes based on your brand strategy.

  3. Make it fill out a monthly table with post ideas for each platform.

  4. Adjust the plan to fit your brand's unique voice and audience preferences.

Pro tip: Export your AI-generated content calendar to a spreadsheet for easy sharing and customization with your team. Additionally, we've already devised full prompts that you can copy if you're a member of The Rundown University.

PRESENTED BY INTERCOM

The Rundown: Intercom just held Pioneer - its first-ever AI customer service summit - and if you missed it, all sessions are now available on-demand.

Here’s what to expect:

  • Practical strategies to seamlessly integrate AI with your support team

  • A first look at Fin 2, Intercom’s most advanced AI Agent yet

  • Insights from companies who’ve successfully scaled support without adding headcount

AI RESEARCH

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Apple researchers just published a new study revealing major limitations in the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, including those from top AI labs like OpenAI’s 4o and o1 models.

The details:

  • Apple scientists developed a new benchmark called GSM-Symbolic to evaluate LLMs' mathematical reasoning skills.

  • The study found that slight changes in the wording of questions or adding irrelevant info drastically altered model outputs, with accuracy dropping by up to 65%.

  • Researchers saw increased performance variability and decreased accuracy as the complexity of questions increased.

  • The team concluded that there was "no evidence of formal reasoning" in the models tested, suggesting that the behavior is more likely sophisticated pattern matching.

Why it matters: While there seem to be conflicting opinions on whether LLMs can truly reason, file this new research under the ‘no’ category. If these limitations hold, they expose some significant questions regarding the reliability and risks of deploying models into increasingly more complex applications.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

  • 💡 Google Illuminate - Transform research papers into AI-generated audio summaries

  • 📎 WPS Office - Free AI-powered office suite with seamless MS Office compatibility

  • 🐦 Sparrow - Open source API testing tool for developers

  • 🧮 CalcGen AI - Transform data into interactive visualizations in seconds

  • 🤖 Kuration AI - Curate, refine, and enrich lead databases with automated B2B AI agents

  • 🎨 People.ai - Creative Marketing Designer

  • 🤖 Meta - Machine Learning Systems Engineer

  • 💼 Anyscale - Head of FP&A

  • 🛠️ Luma AI - Staff Product Designer

QUICK HITS

Free event tomorrow: AI and Disinformation with Section and Dr. Rumman Chowdhury. How can we spot the AI fakes and slow the spread? RSVP free.*

Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun said that existential warnings about AI are ‘complete BS,’ arguing that the current systems are no smarter than a house cat.

TikTok announced hundreds of job cuts globally, citing a shift towards greater use of AI in its content moderation process.

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio warned about the dangers of AI in a new interview, saying humanity is on a path to ‘creating monsters that could be more powerful than us.’

A new study from Sun Yat-sen University used Meta’s ESMFold protein-prediction tool to uncover 70,500 new RNA viruses in environmental data.

Apple reportedly plans to launch a lower-end model of its Vision headset, priced at $2,000 instead of the $3,500 Vision Pro, which has suffered from disappointing sales.

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THAT’S A WRAP

That's it for today!

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, and Alvaro—aka The Rundown Team

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