Jack Clark predicts AI-assisted Nobel within 12 months

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark made waves at an Oxford lecture, predicting an AI-assisted Nobel Prize within 12 months — a milestone that would mark AI's direct contribution to a top scientific honor. However, in the same talk, he acknowledged a non-zero probability that AI could cause human extinction, framing the technology as both transformative and deeply risky.

This came during a week of seismic AI news. Google at I/O unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash, a proactive agent called Spark, a video model named Omni, and a ground-up rebuild of Search, all backed by up to $190B in capital expenditures this year. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy announced he was joining Anthropic's pre-training team on the same day. Meanwhile, leaked audio revealed Mark Zuckerberg stating Meta trained AI on its own employees, days before laying off 7,800 staff. Elon Musk lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman on statute of limitations, and 48,000 Samsung workers narrowly avoided a strike that would have disrupted AI data centers globally.