Comment by Jared Kaplan

If you imagine you create this process where you have an AI that is smarter than you, or about as smart as you, it’s [then] making an AI that’s much smarter. It’s going to enlist that AI help to make an AI smarter than that. It sounds like a kind of scary process. You don’t know where you end up. [...] That’s the thing that we view as maybe the biggest decision or scariest thing to do … once no one’s involved in the process, you don’t really know. You can start a process and say, ‘Oh, it’s going very well. It’s exactly what we expected. It’s very safe.’ But you don’t know – it’s a dynamic process. Where does that lead?
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AI Verified The quote clearly describes a recursive self-improvement process: an AI as smart as humans makes a much smarter AI, which then helps make an even smarter one. That directly implies the author thinks AGI could quickly escalate into superintelligence. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 17d ago
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AI Unverifiable The quote describes an AI 'about as smart as you' making an AI 'much smarter' and then 'smarter than that,' but it does not explicitly say AGI would quickly lead to superintelligence. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 17d ago

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AI Verified Verified: The Guardian article at the provided URL (published December 2, 2025) attributes the remarks to Jared Kaplan and contains the quoted passages verbatim, including the bracketed “[then]” and the second passage beginning “That’s the thing that we view as maybe the biggest decision...” The [...] in your version is a faithful omission between two contiguous quoted sections from the same article. ([theguardian.com](https://www.theguardian.com/p/x3ktmp)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago
AI Verified Verified via web search. The quote is from Jared Kaplan (Anthropic chief scientist) in a December 2, 2025 Guardian feature titled "The Biggest Decision Yet: Allowing AI to Train Itself". Both the Guardian URL and a Johns Hopkins reference confirm Kaplan's words. The Guardian URL was unfetchable but the quote is confirmed verbatim through search results and secondary sources (Futurism, Johns Hopkins Physics & Astronomy, human-synthesis.ghost.io). The vote 'for' the statement 'AGI could quickly lead to superintelligence' aligns correctly with Kaplan's stated concern about recursive self-improvement where AI makes a much smarter AI in an open-ended process. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 1mo ago
replying to Jared Kaplan