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The Anthropic Economic Index

anthropic.com

71–80 of 238 posts

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#71

I wish Anthropic luck. The company seems to be operating in a classic failure mode: being more concerned with its industry than its competitors and customers. See the first few points here: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/27-insights-from-three-... Where I could be wrong is the CEO is technical, however most of what I hear from them is about industry and social impact instead of product.

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Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#72
post #42
post #13

Seems like Anthropic has too much money on their hands and are looking for ways to spend it. It’s surprising to see lean AI startups accumulate fat so quickly. Usually this sort of wheel spinning is reserved for large corporations. And it’s not just them. To me this trend screams “valuations are too high”, and maybe hints at “progress might start to stagnate soon”.

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A majority of its board seats are reserved for people who hold no equity whatsoever and whose explicit mandate is to look out for humanity. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentiv...

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but the practical upshot of this new "Public Benefit Corporation" thing, with or without a trust or non-profit attached, is that you can tell both the public and your investors to fuck off. The reason why all the big AI startups suddenly want to use it is because they can. Normally no sane investor would actually invest in such a structure, but right now the fear that you might be left out of the race for humanity's "last invention" is so acute that they do it anyway. But if Dario Amodei actually cared about humanity any more than Sam Altman, that would be the surprise of the year to me.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#73
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A majority of its board seats are reserved for people who hold no equity whatsoever and whose explicit mandate is to look out for humanity. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentiv...

Put this and 'dont be evil' and 5 dollars in my hand and I'll give you a cup of coffee.

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Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#74
I do wonder how much of the population is using AI.

On page 7 of the paper there's the diagram "Minimum fraction of tasks in use". On the left side about 75% of occupations use at least one tasks and on the right side the maximum is some occupation that uses slightly more than 95% of the tasks.

Cool.

Here I start to wonder how they got that graph.

At the start of section 3. Methods and analysis on page 4 it's said:

> To understand how AI systems are being used for different economic tasks, we leverage Clio [Tamkin et al., 2024], an analysis tool that uses Claude [Anthropic, 2024] to provide aggregated insights from millions of human-model conversations. We use Clio to classify conversations across occupational tasks, skills, and interaction patterns, revealing breakdowns across these different categories. All analyses draw from conversation data collected during December 2024 and January 2025.

So this means they use real people's chats to make these estimations. I don't know Clio, but perhaps they did this? They sample chats from individuals, and some individuals never chatted and some individuals delegated all their work to Claude. But I wonder how they estimated the total numbers of tasks of an individual.

I am sure these answers are found by really going deep and reading the cited sources and running some experiments yourself, but I can't be bothered, sorry.

Again, I really wonder how much of total population use AI? How much? How do parts of population differ? Can this be found out at all?

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#75
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A majority of its board seats are reserved for people who hold no equity whatsoever and whose explicit mandate is to look out for humanity. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentiv...

This is why I cancelled my chatgpt subscription and moved to claude. Its kinda silly, but I feel like the products are about equivalent for my use case so I'd rather do business with a company that is acting in good (better?) faith.

Don't think that's silly at all.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#76
post #72
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A majority of its board seats are reserved for people who hold no equity whatsoever and whose explicit mandate is to look out for humanity. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentiv...

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but the practical upshot of this new "Public Benefit Corporation" thing, with or without a trust or non-profit attached, is that you can tell both the public and your investors to fuck off. The reason why all the big AI startups suddenly want to use it is because they can. Normally no sane investor would actually invest in such a structure, but right now the fear that y…

Can you imagine a hypothetical AI company that did care about humanity, and if so, how would it look different from Anthropic?

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#77
post #74

I do wonder how much of the population is using AI. On page 7 of the paper there's the diagram "Minimum fraction of tasks in use". On the left side about 75% of occupations use at least one tasks and on the right side the maximum is some occupation that uses slightly more than 95% of the tasks. Cool. Here I start to wonder how they got that graph. At the start of section 3. Methods and analysis on page 4 it's said: >…

I don't know about older people, but I'd wager about 100% of young people based on the hushed whispers echoing around the public library.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#78
I agree this is the biggest issue. Too many folks are passing off the potential behind this stuff...this might replace the person beneath me but... As a one person manufacturing business, I've augmented 5 positions that I otherwise would have needed to hire. The end game of this is 10% of the population will be able to produce the goods for 100% of the population. That's the problem statement.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#79
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am inclined to agree. If you’re at the precipice of automating or transforming knowledge work and the value for being the first is nearly infinite (due to “flywheel effects”), why would you dedicate any energy to studying the impact of AI on jobs directly? The thesis is everything changes. I think AI in its current iteration is going to settle into being like a slightly worse version of Wikipedia morphed with a sli…

I think that strongly underestimates the impact LLMs, especially reasoning models, have on how code is written today.

Educate me. I find them useful but they are less so when you try to do something novel. To me, it seems like fancy regurgitation with some novel pattern matching but not quite intuition/reasoning per se.

At the base of LLM reasoning and knowledge is a whole corpus of reasoning and knowledge. I am not quite convinced that LLMs will breach the confines of that corpus and the logical implications of the data there. No “eureka” discovery, just applying what we already have laying around.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#80

I agree this is the biggest issue. Too many folks are passing off the potential behind this stuff...this might replace the person beneath me but... As a one person manufacturing business, I've augmented 5 positions that I otherwise would have needed to hire. The end game of this is 10% of the population will be able to produce the goods for 100% of the population. That's the problem statement.

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