OpenAI CEO Sam Altman looks on during a UN Security Council meeting on artificial intelligence during the 81st United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, Sept. 23. AFP-TNS

Just three years after OpenAI said its models were good at grade-school math, the company announced they had solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem in 88 hours, something that had stumped humanity’s greatest mathematical minds since the 1930s. Project that trend forward and you see why OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman thinks artificial intelligence (AI) will cure all diseases -- and why people are afraid that a rogue AI might harm humanity.

Santa Fe Institute scientists Melanie Mitchell and David Krakauer described AI’s mantra as “Scale is all you need.” What that means is the bigger the training sets and the more computer you have, the better AI becomes. Altman’s vision of AI’s exponential growth curve, and the related hopes and fears, are similarly driven by an unspoken assumption that intelligence is all you need. If you’re smart enough, you can cure cancer - or destroy the world. But that’s not how power and intelligence work.

Anthropic PBC says Claude, its AI model, already writes more than 80 percent of the code its engineers merge. Push that to 100% and AI would be building its own successors. It could keep racing ahead until finally it understood everything and could control everything. That’s the fear and, for some, the hope. AI could create what Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei calls “a country of geniuses in a datacenter.”

The United States ran that experiment at Los Alamos. It put legendary physicists such as Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman and........

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