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Jack Clark quote, May 26, 2026

Co-founder, Anthropic · May 26, 2026 · Keynote, Import AI 458 / 2026 Cosmos HAI Lab Lecture, Oxford

We might soon be able to build an AI system that may be smart enough to develop its own successor, thus kicking off a process of recursive self-improvement which would utterly transform the economy and the broader world.

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Jack Clark

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My worry is that AI systems are both better at coordinating than humans and also much, much faster moving than us.Aug 31, 2026· Post
This means that space mining is a perfect business opportunity for superintelligences that come online - perhaps by 2033 we will see AI-run asteroid mining corporations, bidding on contracts that human-supervised companies are not willing to pursue, due to risk or complexity.Aug 31, 2026· Post
It’s time to plan for this, because AI systems are likely to get better a lot faster than people expect, and as they become more advanced we should expect profound changes to happen to people and to society.May 26, 2026· Keynote
That class of technology has never existed before, and yet I believe this could happen within the next two years, and possibly sooner.May 26, 2026· Keynote
This significant increase in the automation of coding has been equivalent to dropping many, many more employees into Anthropic, speeding up our overall pace of development.May 26, 2026· Keynote
When I look at the graph, I feel a sense of vertigo, because I know a little bit about what underlies this graph.May 26, 2026· Keynote
The surprising thing from my perspective is seeing the feedback across the whole economy, suggesting we might hit an ‘economic singularity’ as a consequence of broad diffusion of automation technologies into the economy.May 11, 2026· Post
This paper points to a future where we get rid of all the software underpinning computers in a traditional sense and just replace it with a gigantic neural network.May 11, 2026· Post

On the same topics

Quote
An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.Nathan LambertSep 19, 2026· Post
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar.Noam BrownSep 17, 2026· Interview
About this quote
Said by
Jack Clark, Co-founder, Anthropic
Where
Import AI 458 / 2026 Cosmos HAI Lab Lecture, Oxford
Topics
Superintelligence, Research
Company
Anthropic
Source
importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-458-reckoning-with-the

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