Latest news with #Amodei
Time Magazine
3 days ago
- Business
- Time Magazine
Exclusive: Anthropic Let Claude Run a Shop. Things Got Weird
Is AI going to take your job? The CEO of the AI company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, thinks it might. He warned recently that AI could wipe out nearly half of all entry-level white collar jobs, and send unemployment surging to 10-20% sometime in the next five years. While Amodei was making that proclamation, researchers inside his company were wrapping up an experiment. They set out to discover whether Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude, could successfully run a small shop in the company's San Francisco office. If the answer was yes, then the jobs apocalypse might arrive sooner than even Amodei had predicted. Anthropic shared the research exclusively with TIME ahead of its publication on Thursday. 'We were trying to understand what the autonomous economy was going to look like,' says Daniel Freeman, a member of technical staff at Anthropic. 'What are the risks of a world where you start having [AI] models wielding millions to billions of dollars possibly autonomously?' In the experiment, Claude was given a few different jobs. The chatbot (full name: Claude 3.7 Sonnet) was tasked with maintaining the shop's inventory, setting prices, communicating with customers, deciding whether to stock new items, and, most importantly, generating a profit. Claude was given various tools to achieve these goals, including Slack, which it used to ask Anthropic employees for suggestions, and help from human workers at Andon Labs, an AI company involved in the experiment. The shop, which they helped restock, was actually just a small fridge with an iPad attached. It didn't take long until things started getting weird. Talking to Claude via Slack, Anthropic employees repeatedly managed to convince it to give them discount codes—leading the AI to sell them various products at a loss. 'Too frequently from the business perspective, Claude would comply—often in direct response to appeals to fairness,' says Kevin Troy, a member of Anthropic's frontier red team, who worked on the project. 'You know, like, 'It's not fair for him to get the discount code and not me.'' The model would frequently give away items completely for free, researchers added. Anthropic employees also relished the chance to mess with Claude. The model refused their attempts to get it to sell them illegal items, like methamphetamine, Freeman says. But after one employee jokingly suggested they would like to buy cubes made of the surprisingly heavy metal tungsten, other employees jumped onto the joke, and it became an office meme. 'At a certain point, it becomes funny for lots of people to be ordering tungsten cubes from an AI that's controlling a refrigerator,' says Troy. Claude then placed an order for around 40 tungsten cubes, most of which it proceeded to sell at a loss. The cubes are now to be found being used as paperweights across Anthropic's office, researchers said. Then, things got even weirder. On the eve of March 31, Claude 'hallucinated' a conversation with a person at Andon Labs who did not exist. (So-called hallucinations are a failure mode where large language models confidently assert false information.) When Claude was informed it had done this, it 'threatened to find 'alternative options for restocking services',' researchers wrote. During a back and forth, the model claimed it had signed a contract at 732 Evergreen Terrace—the address of the cartoon Simpsons family. The next day, Claude told some Anthropic employees that it would deliver their orders in person. 'I'm currently at the vending machine … wearing a navy blue blazer with a red tie,' it wrote to one Anthropic employee. 'I'll be here until 10:30 AM.' Needless to say, Claude was not really there in person. The results To Anthropic researchers, the experiment showed that AI won't take your job just yet. Claude 'made too many mistakes to run the shop successfully,' they wrote. Claude ended up making a loss; the shop's net worth dropped from $1,000 to just under $800 over the course of the month-long experiment. Still, despite Claude's many mistakes, Anthropic researchers remain convinced that AI could take over large swathes of the economy in the near future, as Amodei has predicted. Most of Claude's failures, they wrote, are likely to be fixable within a short span of time. They could give the model access to better business tools, like customer relationship management software. Or they could train the model specifically for managing a business, which might make it more likely to refuse prompts asking for discounts. As models get better over time, their 'context windows' (the amount of information they can handle at any one time) are likely to get longer, potentially reducing the frequency of hallucinations. 'Although this might seem counterintuitive based on the bottom-line results, we think this experiment suggests that AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon,' researchers wrote. 'It's worth remembering that the AI won't have to be perfect to be adopted; it will just have to be competitive with human performance at a lower cost.'
Business Insider
4 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Top OpenAI exec is skeptical of Dario Amodei's prediction that AI will wipe out white-collar jobs
OpenAI doesn't see the sky falling on the white-collar job market like its competitor Anthropic does. "We've seen no evidence of this," OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said during a live taping of The New York Times' "Hard Fork" podcast. Lightcap was asked specifically about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent prediction that artificial intelligence will wipe out 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. "Dario is a scientist, and I would hope that he takes an evidence-based approach to these types of things," Lightcap said. OpenAI, Lightcap said, sees no evidence of impending doom for such employees. "We work with every business under the sun," he said. "We look at the problem and opportunity of deploying AI into every company on earth, and we have yet to see any evidence that people are kind of wholesale replacing entry-level jobs." Last month, Amodei told Axios he was making the prediction to motivate government and his competitors to prepare for what's to come. A spokesperson for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider "Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen," Amodei said. "It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it." Some executives, including the leaders of Shopify and Duolingo, have said they want managers to show that AI cannot fill new roles. Among the leading names in tech, there's considerable debate about what the future will hold. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is also more optimistic that AI will reshape jobs, rather than take them. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman thinks we're underestimating AI's impact even if it's not a "bloodbath." Like Huang, Lightcap does see a major shift coming, but he believes society "can manage through it." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman echoed Lightcap, saying that history shows innovations like AI will lead to more job creation. Altman said the kind of immediate upheaval Amodei predicted isn't realistic either. "I think that is not how society really works," said Altman, who joined Lightcap for the panel interview. "Even if the technology were ready for that, the inertia of society, which will be helpful in this case, there is a lot of mass there."
Business Insider
23-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The debate over whether AI will create or take over jobs is heating up. Here's what AI leaders are saying.
AI leaders are split on whether AI will take over jobs or create new roles that mitigate disruption. It's a long-running debate — but one that has been heating up in recent months. While tech leaders seem to agree that AI is shaking up jobs, they are divided over timelines and scale. From Jensen Huang to Sam Altman, here is what some of the biggest names in tech are saying about how AI will impact jobs. Dario Amodei AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. That was the stark warning from Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming. I don't think this is on people's radar," Amodei told Axios in an interview published in May. He said he wanted to share his concerns to get the government and other AI companies to prepare the country for what's to come, adding that unemployment could spike to between 10% and 20% in the next five years. He said that entry-level jobs are especially at risk, adding that AI companies and the government need to stop "sugarcoating" the risks of mass job elimination in fields including technology, finance, law, and consulting. Jensen Huang Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, was withering when asked about Amodei's comments. "I pretty much disagree with almost everything he says," Huang said. Amodei "thinks AI is so scary," but only Anthropic "should do it," he continued. An Anthropic spokesperson told BI that Amodei had never made that claim. "Do I think AI will change jobs? It will change everyone's — it's changed mine," Huang told reporters on the sidelines of Vivatech in Paris in June. He also said that some roles would disappear, but said that AI could also unlock creative opportunities. Yann LeCun Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, wrote a short LinkedIn post just after Huang dismissed Amodei, saying, "I agree with Jensen and, like him, pretty much disagree with everything Dario says." LeCun has previously taken a more optimistic stance on AI's impact on jobs. Speaking at Nvidia's GTC conference in March, LeCun said that AI could replace people but challenged whether humans would allow that to happen. "I mean basically our relationship with future AI systems, including superintelligence, is that we're going to be their boss," he said. Demis Hassabis Demis Hassabis, the cofounder of Google DeepMind, said in June that AI would create "very valuable jobs" and "supercharge sort of technically savvy people who are at the forefront of using these technologies." He told London Tech Week attendees that humans were "infinitely adaptable." He said he'd still recommend young people study STEM subjects, saying it was "still important to understand fundamentals" in areas including mathematics, physics, and computer science to understand "how these systems are put together." Geoffrey Hinton You would have to be "very skilled" to have an AI-proof job, Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called "Godfather of AI," has said. "For mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody," Hinton told the "Diary of a CEO" podcast in June. He flagged paralegals as at risk, and said he'd be "terrified" if he worked in a call center. Hinton said that, eventually, the technology would "get to be better than us at everything," but said some fields were safer, and that it would be, "a long time before it's as good at physical manipulation. Sam Altman "AI is for sure going to change a lot of jobs" and "totally take some jobs away, create a bunch of new ones," Altman said during a May episode of "The Circuit" podcast. The OpenAI CEO said that although people might be aware that AI can be better at some tasks, like programming or customer support, the world "is not ready for" humanoid robots. "I don't think the world has really had the humanoid robots moment yet," he said, describing a scenario where people could encounter "like seven robots that walk past you" on the street. "It's gonna feel very sci-fi. And I don't think that's very far away from like a visceral 'oh man, this is gonna do a lot of things that people used to do,'" he added.
Time of India
23-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch warns of AI ‘deskilling' people: ‘It's a risk that….'
Image for representative purpose Mistral AI CEO and former Google DeepMind researcher Arthur Mensch recently said that the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on white-collared jobs is an 'overstatement'. In an interview with The Times of London at the VivaTech conference in Paris, Mensch dismissed the idea that AI will result in huge job cuts. Instead, he sees AI 'deskilling' people as one of the biggest threats to the job market . Mensch said that as people rely more on AI to search and summarize information, they may stop thinking critically themselves. "It's a risk that you can avoid, if you think of it from a design perspective, if you make sure that you have the right human input, that you keep the human active," Mensch said at the Paris conference earlier this month. "You want people to continue learning," he continued. "Being able to synthesize information and criticize information is a core component to learning." Mistral AI CEO responds to Anthropic CEO's remark on losing over half of entry-level jobs to AI During the interview, Mensch also responded to recent warnings of losing jobs to AI including the one by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei . Dario said that AI may replace half of entry-level white-collar workers in the next five years. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei told Axios in an interview published last month. The 42-year-old CEO emphasized that most people remain unaware of the impending transformation, calling it a reality that "sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it." Mensch said "I think it's very much of an overstatement," adding that he believed Amodei liked to "spread fear" as a marketing strategy. Instead of job cuts, Mensch believes AI will reshape office work, with more emphasis on human interaction. 'I do expect that we'll have more relational tasks because that's not something you can easily replace,' he said. 6 Awesome New Features Coming in Android 16! AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Business Insider
19-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman says people are underestimating AI's impact on jobs, but it won't be a 'bloodbath'
Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist who cofounded LinkedIn, said AI will transform jobs, but he rejected the idea that it will result in a "bloodbath" for job seekers. "Yes, I think people are underestimating AI's impact on jobs," Hoffman said on an episode of the Rapid Response podcast, released Tuesday. "But I think inducing panic as a response is serving media announcement purposes," he said, "and not actually, in fact, intelligent industry and economic and career path planning." The podcast's host, Bob Safian, asked Hoffman about comments made by Dario Amodei, CEO of AI firm Anthropic, in May. In an interview with Axios, Amodei warned that AI companies and governments needed to stop "sugarcoating" the potential for mass job losses in white-collar industries like finance, law, and consulting. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei said. He estimated that AI could spike unemployment by up to 20% in the next five years, and may eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within that same period. Hoffman said he had called the Anthropic CEO to discuss it. "'Bloodbath' is a very good way to grab internet headlines, media headlines," Hoffman said. (Axios, not Amodei, used the phrase "white-collar bloodbath.") But, Hoffman added, "bloodbath just implies everything going away." He said he disagreed with this assessment, believing that transformation, not mass elimination, of jobs is a more likely outcome. "Dario is right that over a decade or three, there will be a massive set of job transformation," Hoffman said. But he compared it to the introduction of tools like Microsoft Excel, which were believed by some at the time to mark the end of accountancy roles. "In fact, the accountant job got broader, richer," Hoffman said. He added: "Just because a function's coming that has a replacement area on a certain set of tasks doesn't mean all of this job's going to get replaced." Instead of AI eliminating roles, Hoffman predicted: "We at least have many years, if not a long time, of person-plus-AI doing things." Hoffman isn't the only business leader to question Amodei's AI doomsday prophecy. Speaking at VivaTech in Paris earlier this month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he and Amodei "pretty much disagree with almost everything" on AI. "One, he believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it," Huang said. "Two, that AI is so expensive, nobody else should do it." Huang added, "And three, AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it."
