Is Claude Code A False Positive?

Claude Code is phenomenon, no doubt. But does the ability to program make it AGI?

Claude Code has clearly taken the world by storm. It has turned Anthropic into a truly hot company, possibly even hotter than OpenAI at its peak hotness. Code affirms the idea that Anthropic is an enterprise-first company, supporting what appears to have been its strategy all along. It certainly caught OpenAI by surprise, although credit is due for Codex, which provides similar value for OpenAI customers only a few months later.

But… Programs are written in text. And the leading foundation models are all trained in text. So, in hindsight of course, it seems obvious that the first “killer application” of LLMs would be — programming. What is niggling at me is that that might be it for text-trained LLMs. Video doesn’t work that well when you are giving it language prompts. Robotics doesn't either. And training new models takes time that doesn’t support real time information particularly well.

The world is organized differently. Text is the perfect interface for computers, which is why we started with command-line interfaces. Write a command, whether programming or file management, and the computer didn’t need AI to react to the command. But the human did have to know the command. Claude Code is the peak implementation of that history: trained on reams of programming, the LLM is able to write new programs with minimal human interaction. Looks and feels like AGI: Artificial General Intelligence.

But it’s not. That’s why I’m really interested in world models, which is a hot, early development on the premise that you need a model for the physical world as the basis for true AGI that operates in both the virtual and the physical worlds. Read this from Fei-Fei Li: A Functional Taxonomy of World Models. It makes the case for world models. She started World Labs. Yann LeCun started AMI Labs. Niantic Spatial spun out its games business so it could build its tech platform. Runway repositioned itself as a world-model company rather than “just” a video platform.

Claude Code is one of hell of a false positive, but maybe it is distracting everybody from the ultimate objective?