AI rapidly improving, could vastly boost US GDP, Anthropic's Clark tells policymakers

Rapidly improving artificial intelligence capabilities will ​bring far faster change across all fields, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said on Saturday, with one of the company's internal models ‌forecasting that under certain conditions it could increase US economic output by almost 50% by 2030, Report informs via Reuters.

Clark, speaking at IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, said that international cooperation was needed to erect "unusual and serious rules" for the transformative technology, and there was a shrinking window for policymakers to act.

Clark said that the estimated potential US GDP of $44 trillion, which compares ​to the current level of just over $30 trillion, "sounds very outlandish, I know." But he added that AI was vastly increasing scientific discovery.

He said the forecast ​assumed "the technology continuing to get better. And if GDP were to grow this much, then economic doctrine suggests that ⁠new industries and inventions would need to have been created to power such a major economic expansion."

Clark issued a wake-up call to policymakers about ​the speed of AI development, saying there was growing evidence of a "singularity" where AI development outpaces human control.

"We should expect that in the coming years, the whole pace of progress of not just AI but science as a whole will speed up, and this will feel confusing and disorienting, and will bring with it great wealth and potentially ​great peril," he said in a lecture to hundreds of government and finance officials.