Goldman Sachs doesn't have to hire a $180,000 software engineer—meet Devin, its new AI-powered worker
The newest hire at Goldman Sachs won't be able to have a coffee chat with co-worker Rishi Sunak, or attend the firm's after-work happy hour—rather, it'll be working all day on its coding assignments.
The Wall Street investment bank recently unveiled it had hired Devin: a new AI-powered autonomous software engineer, created by AI startup Cognition. With the tool being capable of conducting end-to-end coding tasks, Goldman hopes it will improve worker productivity by up to three or four times the rate of previous AI tools, according to Goldman's chief information officer Marco Argenti.
'We're going to start augmenting our workforce with Devin, which is going to be like our new employee who's going to start doing stuff on the behalf of our developers,' Argenti recently told CNBC.
Goldman Sachs plans to launch Devin by the hundreds—maybe eventually even by the thousands, Argenti added—joining the nearly 12,000 existing software engineers at the company. He said this move will hopefully help usher in a 'hybrid workforce' era where humans and AI coexist.
'It's really about people and AIs working side by side,' Argenti said. 'Engineers are going to be expected to have the ability to really describe problems in a coherent way and turn it into prompts … and then be able to supervise the work of those agents.'
Fortune reached out to Goldman Sachs for comment.
Despite the push to launch Devin, Goldman is continuing to hire software engineers, with dozens of open roles around the world. The salary of some New York-based associate roles start out at around $115,000 annually—and can even extend to $180,000.
But business leaders have warned that these early career roles are the ones that AI might make obsolete the soonest. For example, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Ford CEO Jim Farley went even further, and warned that all white-collar work could disappear in the U.S.—beyond those early in their careers.
'There's more than one way to the American Dream, but our whole education system is focused on four-year [college] education,' Farley said at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month. 'Hiring an entry worker at a tech company has fallen 50% since 2019. Is that really where we want all of our kids to go? Artificial intelligence is gonna replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.'
For the banking industry in particular, this AI-driven workforce transformation could lead to 200,000 fewer people on Wall Street within the next three to five years, according to Bloomberg. However, Argenti said that those who choose to embrace AI will be best equipped for a successful future—and it's especially important for young talent facing dwindling entry-level roles.
'The AI shift is happening in years, not decades,' Argenti wrote in a commentary piece for Fortune. 'Workers who lack proficiency in leveraging AI tools will fall behind, and those who have learned to harness it to elevate their work will advance,' he added.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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VA said it deployed hundreds of uses of artificial intelligence last year, making it one of the agencies most actively tapping AI based on government disclosures. Among the most controversial of these programs has been REACH VET, a scoring algorithm used to prioritize mental health assistance to patients predicted to be at the highest risk of suicide. Last year, an investigation by the Fuller Project, a nonprofit news organization, found that the system prioritized help to White men, especially those who have been divorced or widowed - groups studies show to be at the highest risk of suicide. VA acknowledged that REACH VET previously did not consider known risk factors for suicide in women veterans, making it less likely that women struggling with thoughts of suicide would flagged for assistance. Pete Kasperowicz, a VA spokesman, said in an email that the agency recently updated the REACH VET algorithm to account for several new risk factors specific to women, including military sexual trauma, pregnancy, ovarian cysts and infertility. Since the program launched in 2017, it has helped identify more than 117,000 at-risk veterans, prompting staff to offer them additional support and services, he said. REACH VET was one of over 300 AI applications that the Biden administration labeled 'safety impacting' or 'rights impacting' in annual transparency reports. The Trump administration, which has derided the 'risk-averse approach of the previous administration,' discontinued those labels and will instead denote sensitive programs as 'high-impact.' GRAPHIC Related Content He may have stopped Trump's would-be assassin. Now he's telling his story. He seeded clouds over Texas. Then came the conspiracy theories. How conservatives beat back a Republican sell-off of public lands
