Professor Brian Greene: The Danger of AI, Awareness & The Extinction of Humanity Brian Greene, theoretical physicist at Columbia University, was asked what actually worries him about artificial intelligence. He didn't name a job or an industry. He pointed at the people holding the switch — and at how few of them there are. Epoch AI defines a frontier model as one that ranked in the top ten by training compute at release. Across the 126 frontier models with a published compute estimate, six organisations hold all ten current places: xAI, OpenAI, Meta AI, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA and Anthropic. Nobody elected them. On the same show, Anthropic's own warning is read aloud: full recursive self-improvement could arrive by 2027 to 2028. Dario Amodei's claim is that AI systems outperforming most humans across all human tasks — including software engineering — could arrive within two to three years. Demis Hassabis is citing 2029. Sam Altman says this decade. Greene's answer isn't that we lose. It's that it arrives faster than anyone can check it, and that the people deciding what it does would fit around one table. The question was never whether it can think. It's who it answers to. — SOURCES Epoch AI — AI Models Database, updated 18 August 2026. Frontier model = top ten by training compute at release. Retrieved 19 August 2026. Anthropic's 2027–2028 warning, Dario Amodei's two-to-three-year claim, and the 2026–2029 range are as read out on The Diary of a CEO. We have not independently reviewed the underlying publications. Move 37 — AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol, game two, Seoul, March 2016. Interview: Brian Greene on The Diary of a CEO, August 2026. IMAGE CREDITS (Wikimedia Commons — reuse requires attribution) Sam Altman — Village Global / CC BY 2.0 Dario Amodei — TechCrunch / CC BY 2.0 Demis Hassabis — John Sears / CC BY-SA 4.0 Jensen Huang — Maurizio Pesce / CC BY 2.0 Yann LeCun — Alain Herzog / CC BY 4.0 Elon Musk — Tesla Owners Club Belgium / CC BY 2.0 Elon Musk — Duncan.Hull / CC BY-SA 4.0 Mark Zuckerberg — Anthony Quintano / CC BY 2.0 Isaac Newton portrait — Daniel Vodenitcharov, after Godfrey Kneller / CC0 Go board — Dietmar Rabich / CC BY-SA 4.0 AlphaGo hardware — Immigrant laborer / CC0 FOOTAGE Stock footage via Pexels, including Pavel Danilyuk, cottonbro studio, TREEDEO.ST, Jakub Zerdzicki, RDNE Stock project and Rhema Emeka-Chiemenem.