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Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

tomshardware.com

121–130 of 195 posts

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s going to eliminate jobs. that's the part i'm not sold on yet. it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week - but every dev in every company will be able to use that tool, thus it will increase the productivity of each engineer by an equal amount. that means each company's products will get much better much faster - and it means that any company that cuts head count will be at risk of falling behin…

> it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week Exaggerations like this really don't help your credibility

How many teams of 10 took a year and USD 5 millions to develop a CRUD that failed? That can be done in one week now

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#122
post #25

Hey now, let's not criticize the Anthropic CEO just yet. He made a totally not just pulling a number out of his ass prediction, but a prediction that's nonetheless falsifiable. > that 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs could be wiped out by artificial intelligence, causing unemployment to jump to 20% within the next five years I'm not a betting woman but I feel extremely confident taking the other end of this b…

The other end is that we continue a roughly 3% unemployment over the next 5 years. I am curious to hear why you think that?

False dichotomy, we don't have to continue at 3% for the 20% prediction to be wrong.

So far, I've seen jobs lost to tariffs. I've yet to see a job lost to AI. Observations are not evidence, but so far there is no evidence I see that shows AI to be a stronger macro economic force than say recessions, tariffs (trade wars) or actual wars.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#123
Sonnet 4 changed my mind on AI safety. It can do ALOT of work unattended, real work like configuring servers. If you give it a goal, and a set of tools, it will get the job done. But I got freaked out the first time I used it, since I didn't realize just how good it was at pursuing it's goal. I gave it a custom MCP server with limited bash commands. But one of the commands was python (I assumed Anthropic would have trained it not to be so relentless... i was wrong), with that it just gladly used python to build and execute any command I didn't give direct access to. Sonnet 4 is scary smart and efficient. The only hesitation i have is that it's messy. For example, since it does not have a memory (i'm using claude desktop) i've seen it duplicate installations/configurations of containers if it failed to find the origional installation. The solution is to add language to the prompt instructing it to drop documentation, and to read documentation on everything it does.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#124
post #19

Companies like Nvidia and OpenAI base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history. They are fighting like hell to make sure they are among a small set of winners while waving away the risk or claiming that there's some better future for the majority of people on the other side of all this. To claim that all of the benefit isn't going to naturally accr…

> base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history.

We used to just call that lying.

> When AI finally does cause massive disruption to white collar work

It has to exist first. Currently you have a chat bot that requires terabytes of copyrighted data to function and has sublinear increases in performances for exponential increases in costs. These guys genuinely seem to be arguing over a dead end.

> what happens then?

What happened when gasoline engines removed the need to have large pools of farm labor? It turns out people are far more clever than a "chat bot" and entire new economies became invented.

> that we see some form of swift and punitive backlash, politically or otherwise.

Or people just move onto the next thing. It's hilarious how small imaginations become when "AI" is being discussed.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are actively not hiring expecting AI to compensate and still have growth. I have seen these same companies giving smaller raises and less promotions, and eliminate junior positions. The endgame isn't more employees or paying them more. It's paying less people or no skilled people when possible. That's a fairly massive disruption.

We're just 3 years after a giant hiring binge, a similar amount of time post zero interest rates, the US economy has been threatening recession for two years, and economic uncertainty is very high, and post Covid had a glut of junior engineers coming onto the market. Between all of these plausible explanations for why hiring is way down, is there macro economic evidence it really is AI and not anything else?

That hiring binge was already nullified by the waves of layoffs.

I think everything else you’re saying is happening/has happened but companies hiring less because of anticipated AI productivity gains is also occurring. Like the scuttlebutt I hear about certain faangs requiring managers have 9-10 direct reports now instead of 7

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week Exaggerations like this really don't help your credibility

How many teams of 10 took a year and USD 5 millions to develop a CRUD that failed? That can be done in one week now

I'm not sure that spending $5 Million to fail every week is actually better than spending $5 million to fail once a year

Brings a crazy new meaning to "fail fast" though

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. What worker uprising occurred in the US in 1995? I (and basically every economist) disagree with your interpretation of historical events. https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370

Where is worker productivity on that graph exactly?

Why does that matter? According to you, productivity is not what leads to increases in wages. You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising. I showed that worker wages went up starting in 1995. According to you, there must have been a worker uprising to explain that.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#129
post #102

The reason that AI companies are valuated so highly is the inherent promise of replacing humans in the labor force.

In the Big Short movie there is a scene where the old trader scolds two newbies: "why are you so happy? don't you understand that if your bet is right, it means the american economy is going to crash, that millions will lose their jobs?"

Right now we're betting on sp500 going up, which is mostly backed by the belief that machines are going to replace us soon.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#130
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's early days and nobody knows how things will go, but to me it looks that in the next century or so How is it early days? AI has been talked about since at least the 50s, neural networks have been a thing since the 80s. If you are worried about how technology will be in a century, why stop right here? Why not take the state of computers in the 60s and stop there? Chances are, if the current wave does not achieve…

> How is it early days? When you have exponential growth, it's always early days. Other than that I'm not clear on what you're saying. What is in your mind the difference between how we should plan for the societal impact of AI in the short vs the long term?

> When you have exponential growth, it's always early days.

Let‘s take the development of CPUs where for 30-40 years the observable performance actually did grow exponentially (unlike the current AI boom where it does not).

Was it always early days? Was it early days for computers in 2005?

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