My internal monologue reading Anthropic's big idea posts

Anthropic launched a missive on recursive self-improvement in Claude and how it is writing its own code and building itself. It's fascinating and potentially scary because it's also great marketing.

In a missive, Anthropic said AI systems, notably Claude, have the potential to "fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement."

Now Anthropic noted we're not there yet as model recursive self-improvement "is not inevitable." However, "it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for."

When I read that I go “oooh, that's interesting.” Here's altruistic Anthropic highlighting something that people, businesses, governments and policymakers need to think about. At this point, I'm bathing in the reality distortion field and the idea that AI is worth every $1 trillion spent in the next week or so.

A minute later, I’m thinking: "Damn these guys are good at marketing. This may be better than Mythos. It's probably not as good as an audience with the Pope and influencing his massive riff on AI."

Keep in mind as I read Anthropic’s regular cadence of big ideas I see the potential, conjecture, maybes and hypotheticals along with the marketing.

Simply put, Anthropic has the market cornered on big ideas and models that are too good for public consumption. This creates a great flywheel of marketing and FOMO that leads to an IPO. Toss in the white tower big thinking from Anthropic and you truly have marketing gold. Anthropic is the MVP of the AI value chain because someone other than Jensen Huang needs you to keep you believing that AI will accelerate and replace humans. Oh wait, we backtracked from the human replacement thing since well, humans are pissed off and that's a political headache.

Anthropic continues:

"AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology—one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important."

All of that's true, except for the reality we don't quite understand the whole recursive self-improvement loop in humans. Recursive self-improvement requires intuition and the ability to learn from missed opportunities and errors. We've created models that are great wordsmiths (sometimes) and coders. There are limits to the AI vs. human equation.

After way too many words about how Claude is great at everything and running Anthropic, the company gets to the punchline. Anthropic lays out a few scenarios and then drops this gem.

"If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures.

We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner."

Here's where I go:

• Well, we can't possibly slow down the development of AI since the entire US economy now depends on the dream.
• Boy, I'm thankful we have the Anthropic Institute to save us.
• We need more AI data centers to see Claude truly self actualize.
• Gotta sign up for that Claude subscription.

Damn, I fell for this again. Anthropic is good. How much are those IPO share going for again?

• Anthropic confidentially files for IPO
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• Anthropic buys all of SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center capacity
• Anthropic, Amazon links tighten: Anthropic to spend $100 billion over 10 years on AWS capacity
• Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.7, migration advice