Artificial intelligence is becoming more involved in creating the technology that could eventually succeed it.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, says Claude is now playing a substantial role in the research and development work used to create future AI models.
According to reporting by the Associated Press, Anthropic says Claude was leading about 26% of its model research and development work as of August, while participating in roughly 90% of R&D tasks.
That doesn’t mean Claude has suddenly become autonomous or is secretly building new AI systems by itself. Human researchers remain involved, and Anthropic describes the technology as a tool that helps researchers perform portions of their work.
But the development illustrates an important shift.
AI systems aren’t being used only to answer questions, write documents, create images and assist everyday users anymore. They’re increasingly becoming tools for the scientists and engineers developing the next generation of artificial intelligence.
That could potentially accelerate AI research because researchers can use existing AI systems to help with coding, experiments, analysis and other development tasks.
And Anthropic isn’t stopping with computer science.
The company has also established a biology laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area as it explores how AI could assist researchers with laboratory experiments and life-sciences research.
The big question is what happens as increasingly capable AI systems become increasingly useful in the process of developing their successors.
For now, humans remain in charge of that process.
But AI helping humans build better AI?
That’s certainly something worth keeping an eye on.
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