Is AI growing too fast for humanity?
The Times Tech Podcast
Will Morley
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are we heading for the next ChatGPT moment? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has sparked debate about the growth of AI and its acceleration into a risky new phase. But is it real danger or Silicon Valley hype? Danny Fortson and Katie Prescott are joined by Barney Hussey-Yeo, CEO of UK fintech Cleo, on what it’s actually like building with AI right now and whether society is ready for the next turning point. Plus, the backlash over tech CEOs cozying up to US President Donald Trump amid anger over his immigration crackdown.
Image: Cleo
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast where every week we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture and everyday life. |
| 0:12.4 | I am Danny Fortson out here in Silicon Valley. |
| 0:15.6 | And I'm Katie Prescott over here in the city of London. |
| 0:19.9 | And Danny, this week feels like one of those |
| 0:22.2 | sort of key moments in tech, doesn't it? The sort where people start asking whether we're |
| 0:28.3 | on the edge of something that is about to change. Yeah, there's a vibe. There's something in the |
| 0:35.0 | air. But it's not from like a product launch or a demo, |
| 0:37.8 | but it's really a question about whether we're approaching another kind of Chet GPT style |
| 0:44.5 | moment. And this kind of question has been posed by Dario Amadeh. He's the CEO of Anthropic, |
| 0:52.9 | the company behind Claude, and of course, |
| 0:55.8 | friend of the pod. |
| 0:57.2 | Very good friend of the pod who you interviewed, gosh, over a year ago now, I think. |
| 1:01.0 | And was formerly at OpenAI before he split off with his sister to found Anthropics. |
| 1:08.7 | He's posted this really, really long essay called The Adolescence of |
| 1:12.9 | Technology, which says a lot about what stage he thinks we're at. And in it, he argues, |
| 1:17.9 | humanity is entering a phase of AI development that will, and I'm quoting him here, test who |
| 1:24.2 | we are as a species. Because as we know, being a teenager is very difficult. Yeah, so it's a very |
| 1:31.8 | long essay. It's 19,000 words, which is, you know, like a novella. It's basically a sequel. So over a year |
| 1:37.7 | ago, Dario wrote another essay called Machines of Loving Grace. And that one, kind of the conceit was, what if this all goes right? What if this age of abundance is truly unlocked by AI? We're going to have a century of medical and scientific breakthroughs in a decade. We're going to cure cancer. We're going to solve climate change. maybe we'll live forever. Like all of these |
| 2:00.8 | are almost like sci-fi kind of outcomes that he says, this is potentially how it's going to go. |
| 2:06.5 | This one, the adolescence of technology is very different. This is where are the potholes? |
| 2:13.2 | Where are the pitfalls? How can this go terribly, terribly, terribly wrong for all of us? His basic |
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