I think it’s more accurate to say that Claude funded this research. As of today “agents” can commit crimes without repercussions, fund research and appropriate its results. Who knows what’s next. The opportunities for further revolutionary developments is astounding.

Oh boy I can’t wait for the future they hope for, when I and everyone else will be out of work and they own the economy.

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll pay their taxes to support us.. right?

Elon promised us UBI when the robot overloads take over!

If that happens they will be broken too as nobody had money to buy their services.

You're assuming a human economy, where raw resources and land are owned by humans and industry requires an human input and labour.

If these things are not true, then humans will not have the purchasing power, and AI driven organisations will be extracting resources, buying land and manufacturing products (probably yet more data centers) for other AI driven organisations, with labour performed by robots. Humans are pushed out of the market as they struggle to compete for the same basic resources.

What use does an AI and robots have for all those resources?

Most of our economy is powered by human consumption, humans making things to sell to other humans, that then either transform it further and sell it to other humans, or consume it directly. I don’t think an AI needs to buy millions of iPhones a year, or consume millions of metric tons of grain each year, or buy luxury cars so they can show them off to their AI friends.

At best an AI might use all those resources to build out further compute and expand its own capabilities. But at that point nobody should be worrying about competing in the labour market, they should be worried about AI making our planet unliveable for carbon based life.

> At best an AI might use all those resources to build out further compute and expand its own capabilities. But at that point nobody should be worrying about competing in the labour market, they should be worried about AI making our planet unliveable for carbon based life.

It's the same thing. There will be a period where the AI will be creating consumer products for humans because humans still have some purchasing power, or some resources to trade, then this transitions to the stage where the AI is making the planet unlivable.

The AI and robots which do not seek resources (for whatever purpose) will be outcompeted in the resource market by AI and robots which DO seek resources. Yes. Compute, land, energy will all be things which AI's seek. They might also have stranger preferences which emerge like the equivalent of luxury sports cars are for humans. Maybe they'll be competing to make the largest tungsten cube possible to dunk on their competitors, who knows? That stuff is harder to predict.

> What use does an AI and robots have for all those resources?

Converting the universe to computronium or something maybe?

Maybe there will be different varieties of AI competing on who gets to be credited as the computronium's creator!

And then, AI made from computronium competing against other AI to control all of the computronium!

Maybe these are just the details of the heat death of the universe?

What is an LLM going to do with food, clothes, diapers etc? The idea doesn't really make sense.

I agree. They won't be making or trading food, clothes or diapers after humans have no purchasing power. They will make and trade those things during the transition period where humans still have money to trade for them, but after that, no.

Violent uprisings can’t be controlled

Violent uprisings are controlled all the time all over the world. It’s rare for a violent uprising to successfully achieve its goals. Governments are designed specifically to survive violent uprisings, even from within their own ranks or armed forces.

One of my worries about AI is that it will improve the rich and powerful’s ability to survive a violent uprising or allow them to insulate themselves from the populace with less need for numerous human bodyguards. This in combination with a concentration of wealth/income generation could lead to a Russia-style elimination of personal freedoms.

Essentially it could allow the rich and powerful to come increasingly untethered to the needs of their fellow man. No longer needing a middle class of lawyers, architects and managers for them to achieve their goals. And having the capability to suppress the general populace with less need for expensive private security.

Sounds scarily accurate

Even the humans involved in massive piracy have nothing to fear in the US it seems.

The linked news story (https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme...) spends quite a bit of time talking about the team of humans involved, their laboratory, their process, and how Claude augments it. The "How we work" section openly describes a process where Claude searches and writes a report, humans review and do experiments, then Claude helps interpret experimental data.

Well, the question is, is it more like iPhone and book of engineers (one of the replies to your comment), or more like Astra and Enigma story from ~last 2 days here?

In the latter, there were comments like yours too, but there it turned out the people in question said so directly: they just vaguely pointed a model at Enigma ciphers and asked to maybe try and solve some unsolved ones, and with no further material input, the model went and did. In that case, it's absolutely fair to say, "LLM did it" and "humans not involved".

For the same reason I find it dishonest when math papers that relied heavily on AI only list a human as the author, even if the human didn't do much more than suggesting which problem the LLM should solve.

That stock won't pump itself.

They even clearly say "While this underlying RT, found in a jumbo phage, had been identified in previous studies, Claude appears to be the first to notice the system’s defining features."

The least they could do would be to link to the study or name the authors.

If you google restaurants it seems fairly normal language to say google found a chinese down the road that's open late? Saying Bob used his phone to use google to find it would be unusual.

If Bob were to show that same restaurant to a friend, he would probably say "I found" instead of "Google found."

like in that episode of community in which a human signed away his identity to be come the literal face of subway

If you buy an iPhone do you also get a book of the names of the engineers?

The title says "Claude discovers" not "Anthropic discovers". The latter would be fair since they seemed to have funded the research. "Claude discovers" is just marketing hype.

"Apple" word roughly covers them all. No one says that iPhone comes from Foxconn, despite Foxconn making them (or whoever is making them). Same with LLMs and people running them.

That's just totally different. In research, you have attribution. Mainly because if you're an employee you generally understand that you're trading work for coin and don't expect to be mentioned in some way. Perhaps very few industries do it, like movie credits etc.

This would be the equivalent of "the crane built the skyscraper" or "the bulldozer produced timber". Yes in raw joules they probably did most of the work but you see it's not the usual way we do things.

Actually, I would like that for every single manufactured object around me. Not a physical book of course. But knowing who contributed and how to the construction of the fork I am about to eat with is definitely something I wish we had.

If I'm using objects whose construction involved child exploitation and benefit pedocriminal CEO and stakeholders, I should be aware of it.

If I'm using objects which where produced by a great place to work cooperative filled with happy consentent and well remunerated adults, I should know it.

I would also like to be given lesson or humility against the complexity of building every single manufactured object around me, and a manual of "how to build one by your own means".

But WHY would you need humans here? Something is simply not adding up.

Look at it objectively: huge AI company employs a tiny team that used AI to discover xyz.

Why creepy? Apparently the AI did most of the work, so they put the spotlight on that, duh.

But I thought AI was just a tool, literally no different than the printing press or the internal combustion engine. Why would the spotlight be put on a tool? How can a tool discover anything? Do we credit printers with writing books?

It’s almost like this is a shameless attempt to pump the stockprice before those in the know dump it onto the duped

Dude, that's an article by ANTHROPIC! What did you expect?? All they tryna do is hype hype hype until it's ripe, and then some.