Dario Amodei — We are near the end of the exponential

Broadly speaking, the exponential of the underlying technology has gone about as I expected it to go. There's plus or minus a year or two here and there.

What has been the most surprising thing is the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential.

Now we have RL scaling and there's no publicly known scaling law for it. It's not even clear what the story is.

I think AI will diffuse much faster than previous technologies have, but not infinitely fast.

Big enterprises, big financial companies, big pharmaceutical companies, all of them are adopting Claude Code much faster than enterprises typically adopt new technology.

They're moving much faster than when we tried to sell them just the ordinary API, which many of them use. Claude Code is a more compelling product, but it's not an infinitely compelling product.

I don't know for sure, but I think they're going to get you a large fraction of it. There may be gaps, but I certainly think that just as things are, this is enough to generate trillions of dollars of revenue.

We have the pre-training and RL stage where you throw a bunch of data and tasks into the models and then they generalize. So it's like learning, but it's like learning from more data and not learning over one human or one model's lifetime.

I would describe it as kind of like human on-the-job learning, but a little weaker and a little short term.

Anthropic has predicted that by late '26 or early '27 we will have AI systems that "have the ability to navigate interfaces available to humans doing digital work today, intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners, and the ability to interface with the physical world".

My guess for that is there's a lot of problems where basically we can do this when we have the "country of geniuses in a data center". My picture for that, if you made me guess, is one to two years, maybe one to three years.

One question is: How many years after that do the trillions in revenue start rolling in? I don't think it's guaranteed that it's going to be immediate. It could be one year, it could be two years, I could even stretch it to five years although I'm skeptical of that.