If you’ve been using AI as a fancy search engine, it’s time to think bigger. Way bigger.
Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic and the creator of the AI assistant Claude, recently told students at Oxford University that in the next 12 months, an AI system will work with humans to produce a scientific discovery that could win a Nobel Prize. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of his predictions.
Clark spoke of a “vertiginous sense of progress” in the field, almost dizzy at how fast things are moving. This is the kind of bold claim that deserves both attention and scrutiny from a generation that has seen endless delays to self-driving cars and AI chatbots fumbling basic questions.
This is already beginning to happen
The thing is, Clark's Nobel prediction isn't coming out of nowhere. It has almost already happened.
2024 saw AI receive its biggest accolade yet, with two Nobel Prizes awarded to researchers whose work stemmed from artificial intelligence. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in machine learning. In another development, David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using AI to crack the protein-folding problem, a challenge that had stumped scientists for more than 50 years.
What Clark is saying is that the next breakthrough is already in the pipeline, and this time, AI won’t just help with research. It might push it.
A timeline that sounds wild, until it doesn't
Clark did not stop at the Nobel Prizes. He laid out a bigger roadmap for where he sees AI going.
Within 18 months, he believes we'll be seeing companies staffed entirely by AI agents making millions in revenue. In two years, we’ll have bipedal robots with AI brains working alongside tradespeople on job sites. And by 2028, AI systems could be designing their own successors, effectively creating the next generation of themselves.
He also warned that one day AI could become “more capable than all of us collectively,” comparing the failure to prepare the public to the failure to prepare for pandemics such as COVID-19 adequately.
