alt Hacker NewsAnthropic's CEO Dario has annoyed me to no end with his "AI will take all the jobs in 6 months" doomer speeches on every podcast he graces his presence with.
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I don't understand why some of these AI companies check their egos at the door and hire public relations companies. Yes, I understand they are changing the world but customers do not open their wallets when they are scared. Very few people I know are as avant-guarde as I am with AI, but, most people look at these new technologies and simply feel fear. Why pay for something that will replace you?
It certainly is. For people who have not heard the statements, here are some quotes. I bring them up, because I think it's worthwhile to remember the bold predictions that are made now and how they will pan out in the future.
Council on Foreign Relations, 11 months ago: "In 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is essentially writing all of the code."
Axios interview, 8 months ago: "[...] AI could soon eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs."
The Adolescence of Technology (essay), 1 month ago: "If the exponential continues—which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it—then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything."
Also "AGI is just around the corner".
It makes me wonder why he has the job of CEO then if he's so confident that the technology will destroy the world.
Don't worry, I know exactly why. $
+1, he also has this viewpoint that no other lab will be able to "contain" AI and has a general doomer outlook on AI which I don't appreciate.
What I find so funny about heads of AI companies coming out saying things like this, is their own career pages suggest they don't actually feel that way.
When did he say this?
He’s an e/acc guy. That should tell you everything. And maybe the incredibly awkward behavior and demeanor.
He's annoyed me most with the way he speaks. I'm not sure if its a tick or what but the way he'll repeat a word 10x before starting a sentence is painful to listen to.
I think he's right and we should be thinking about this a lot more. Even the IMF is worried about 40 - 60% of global employment: https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/01/14/ai-will-tra...
Focusing on Dario, his exact quote IIRC was "50% of all white collar jobs in 5 years" which is still a ways off, but to check his track record, his prediction on coding was only off by a month or so. If you revisit what he actually said, he didn't really say AI will replace 90% of all coders, as people widely report, he said it will be able to write 90% of all code.
And dhese days it's pretty accurate. 90% of all code, the "dark matter" of coding, is stuff like boilerplate and internal LoB CRUD apps and typical data-wrangling algorithms that Claude and Codex can one-shot all day long.
Actually replacing all those jobs however will take time. Not just to figure out adoption (e.g. AI coding workflows are very different from normal coding workflows and we're just figuring those out now), but to get the requisite compute. All AI capacity is already heavily constrained, and replacing that many jobs will require compute that won't exist for years and he, as someone scrounging for compute capacity, knows that very well.
But that just puts an upper limit on how long we have to figure out what to do with all those white collar professionals. We need to be thinking about it now.