Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei sat down with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes on Sunday for a wide-ranging interview on AI.
During their conversation, Amodei reiterated his belief that AI will eventually be “smarter than most or all humans in most or all ways,” will play an instrumental role in curing cancers, and, unless regulations are instituted, could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs and spike unemployment in the next one to five years.
“If we look at entry-level consultants, lawyers, financial professionals,” said Amodei, “a lot of what they do, AI models are already quite good at.”
Amodei told Cooper that “it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be some significant job impact there, and my worry is that it’ll be broad, and it’ll be faster than what we’ve seen from previous technology.”
Amodei said that it’s essential for Anthropic to talk about the potential downsides and “what could go wrong” with AI because “if we don’t, then you could end up in the world of the cigarette companies and opioid companies, where they knew there were dangers and didn’t talk about them, and certainly didn’t prevent them.”
Logan Graham, leader of Anthropic’s red team, which investigates and attempts to mitigate malicious uses of the company’s AI model, Claude, explained the dangers in terms that entrepreneurs will surely understand: “You want a model to go build your business and make you a billion dollars,” he told Cooper, “but you don’t want to wake up one day and find that it’s locked you out of the company.” For example, Anthropic recently said that a Chinese state-sponsored organization used Claude Code to execute a global cyberattack.
In early tests of Claude’s ability to run a business autonomously, the model has demonstrated that it still has a long way to go. Earlier this year, Anthropic partnered up with Andon Labs, a startup experimenting with “autonomous organizations” for an experiment in which Claude was tasked with operating a vending machine in Anthropic’s San Francisco office. So far, the vending machine hasn’t made much money because it gives away too many discounts.
But Amodei is confident that autonomous capabilities like these will rapidly improve, which is why he believes it’s imperative for regulatory bodies to be proactive about controlling AI. He told Cooper that he is “deeply uncomfortable” with unelected individuals like himself and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman making wide-reaching decisions without any oversight, adding that “this is one reason why I’ve always advocated for responsible and thoughtful regulation of the technology.”
Anthropic is a leading AI firm whose chief competitor is OpenAI, the organization where all of Anthropic’s seven cofounders previously worked; it also competes with more established entities like Google, Meta, X, and Microsoft.
Ben Sherry
Source link