Dario Amodei Predicted at Davos in January 2025 That AI Could Surpass Humans "at Almost Everything" Within 2 to 3 Years. As Anthropic Prepares for Its $2 Trillion IPO, Is That Timeline Still on Track?

Anthropic just released its S-1 filing publicly and is poised to raise upward of $100 billion from its upcoming initial public offering (IPO). We don't have pricing details for it yet, but rumors suggest it will debut with a value of around $2 trillion, making it one of the world's largest companies.

In January 2025, Anthropic founder Dario Amodei said that within two to three years, artificial intelligence (AI) powered by companies like his could surpass humans in virtually all tasks. Well, in just a couple of months, we'll be entering the period he was prognosticating about. Does it look like he'll prove correct?

Automating humans, but only virtually

AI is now good at writing software, surfing the internet, and explaining topics to people. In other words, things you or I can do with a computer. There are still many things AI is not better at than humans (for example, if an AI wrote this article, you'd probably be able to tell, given the formulaic tendencies of chatbots), but for all intents and purposes, the technology can automate much of what a human can do on a computer.

However, this misses the big picture of what Amodei pointed to: surpassing humans at virtually any task. First, today, most tasks that require at least some portion of the action to take place outside of the digital realm can't be completed solely by AI. Sure, there has been progress in industrial automation, humanoid robots, and self-driving cars, but these technologies are far from being 100% better than humans at all tasks in their respective fields.

Second, this line of framing is not logical when put with employment numbers. At least today, humans still need to provide direction to AI, whether they are using it to supplement or enhance their work, or explore new topics as a hobby. If AI could truly surpass all humans at all tasks, corporations would no longer need human employees. Yet the unemployment rate in the United States remains at a healthy 4.2%.

Image source: Getty Images.

How will this impact Anthropic's IPO?

Anthropic is banking on its rapid growth continuing into the near future. It wants to go public with a $2 trillion valuation, but it had revenue of only $11.6 billion in the second quarter of this year. Revenue has been growing by north of 10x year over year, making it one of the fastest-growing businesses in history, but that growth will need to continue for quite some time for the company to be worth $2 trillion or more in the future.

That would have to come from expanding AI use cases beyond software and chatbots, potentially upending every industry on the planet. And that is what most of these AI giants see as the long-term plan.

If Anthropic can keep improving its models, maybe someday Amodei's prediction that AI will surpass human capabilities in most tasks will prove to be right in essence, even if he was wrong about the timing. You could buy this stock thinking that will happen at some point, but that day has not come yet.

The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.