Anthropic's CEO is Wrong, AI Won't Eliminate Half of White-Collar Jobs, Says NVIDIA's CEO (fortune.com) 29
Last week Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could eliminate half the entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. CNN called the remarks "part of the AI hype machine."
Asked about the prediction this week at a Paris tech conference, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged AI may impact some employees, but "dismissed" Amodei's claim, according to Fortune. "Everybody's jobs will be changed. Some jobs will be obsolete, but many jobs are going to be created ... Whenever companies are more productive, they hire more people."
And he also said he "pretty much" disagreed "with almost everything" Anthropic's CEO says. "One, he believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it," Huang said of Amodei at a press briefing at Viva Technology in Paris. "Two, [he believes] that AI is so expensive, nobody else should do it ... And three, AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it. I think AI is a very important technology; we should build it and advance it safely and responsibly," Huang continued. "If you want things to be done safely and responsibly, you do it in the open ... Don't do it in a dark room and tell me it's safe."
An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune in a statement: "Dario has never claimed that 'only Anthropic' can build safe and powerful AI. As the public record will show, Dario has advocated for a national transparency standard for AI developers (including Anthropic) so the public and policymakers are aware of the models' capabilities and risks and can prepare accordingly.
NVIDIA's CEO also touted their hybrid quantum-classical platformCUDA-Q and claimed quantum computing is hitting an "inflection point" and within a few years could start solving real-world problems
Asked about the prediction this week at a Paris tech conference, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged AI may impact some employees, but "dismissed" Amodei's claim, according to Fortune. "Everybody's jobs will be changed. Some jobs will be obsolete, but many jobs are going to be created ... Whenever companies are more productive, they hire more people."
And he also said he "pretty much" disagreed "with almost everything" Anthropic's CEO says. "One, he believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it," Huang said of Amodei at a press briefing at Viva Technology in Paris. "Two, [he believes] that AI is so expensive, nobody else should do it ... And three, AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it. I think AI is a very important technology; we should build it and advance it safely and responsibly," Huang continued. "If you want things to be done safely and responsibly, you do it in the open ... Don't do it in a dark room and tell me it's safe."
An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune in a statement: "Dario has never claimed that 'only Anthropic' can build safe and powerful AI. As the public record will show, Dario has advocated for a national transparency standard for AI developers (including Anthropic) so the public and policymakers are aware of the models' capabilities and risks and can prepare accordingly.
NVIDIA's CEO also touted their hybrid quantum-classical platformCUDA-Q and claimed quantum computing is hitting an "inflection point" and within a few years could start solving real-world problems
ho-hum (Score:2)
He said, she said. Que sera, sera.
Trickle down automation. (Score:3)
Everybody's jobs will be changed. Some jobs will be obsolete, but many jobs are going to be created ... Whenever companies are more productive, they hire more people.
*looks at video of Amazon robots working*
Re: (Score:2)
Amazon is plowing a TON of money into those robots. They can't just "insert LLM" and the robots know what to do. The training and manufacturing process is extremely expensive. Only the biggest companies will be able to afford such machines. Even Amazon can't roll them out quickly. If they could, they would already not be employing thousands of warehouse workers.
The plumbing supply warehouse down the street, or the tool distribution center or the local bakery--they aren't going to be building or buying robot
Why is dueling CEO quotes a story? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even leaving aside the notrivial odds that what a CEO says is flat out wrong and the near certainty that what the CEO says is less well informed than what someone at least a layer or two closer to the technology or the product rather than to vague, abstract, 'management'; unless a C-level is being cleverly ambushed when away from their PR handlers with a few drinks in them or actively going off script in the throes of some personal upset, why would you expect their pronouncements to be anything but their company's perceived interests restated as personal insights?
Surprise, surprise, the AI-company guy is here to tell us that the very large, high barrier to entry, models are like spooky scary and revolutionary real soon now; even if you wouldn't know it from the quality of the product they can actually offer at the present time; while the AI-hardware guy is here to tell you that AI is friendly and doesn't bite but everyone needs even more than they thought they did, ideally deployed yesterday; because the AI-company people need to hype up the future value of throwing more cash and more patience at money-losing LLMs; and the AI-hardware people need to juice the total addressable market by any means necessary.
Re: (Score:3)
Because the subtext matters. JHH is giving the standard 20th century industrialist answer to the question of what automation does to employment. Keep in mind that from ~1970 onward, worker productivity went steadily up while leaving behind their pay.
JHH is promising more of the same, albeit perhaps for white collar employees.
Dario is predicting job loss as a way to promote his business to the sort of people who might enjoy such things. He's more of a reverse luddite than JHH.
Either way it sucks. You get
Re: (Score:2)
Fucking trolls... Swoop into a thread, pretend to be above it all, and derail any substantive discussion with performative cynicism and industrial-strength condescension. This troll isn't here to analyze—he's here to sneer.
Why do we even consider it a story when there are a couple of CEO quotes to mash together?
Because one CEO is fear-pitching mass unemployment to consolidate control, and the other is calling that bullshit out in public. If you think that's just “quotes mashed together,” you’re either not paying attention—or you're deliberately trying to make sure
Not only white collar jobs (Score:2)
Anyone care to predict the time window where AI-powered humanoid bots start eliminating jobs for sex workers?
Re: (Score:2)
Companion (2025), shows replacement may not be a good idea.
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Anyone care to predict the time window where AI-powered humanoid bots start eliminating jobs for sex workers?
More important to predict the time window where speech recognition of safe words during adverse conditions becomes reliable.
The future is becoming... (Score:2)
...increasingly unpredictable
Hypemongers continue to make inflated predictions in order to get investment or attention
Real progress is being made, but it's nowhere near the hype
Re: (Score:3)
The future has always been completely unpredictable.
Machines have never been smarter in the breadth .. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Together with robotic automation, there is really no need for human supervision in half the jobs, if not more.
DROP YOUR WEAPON, YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY
I don't get bootlickers (Score:2)
Nobody is going to reward you
Of course not. (Score:2)
It will actually eliminate 75% of all existing white-collar jobs.
Re: Of course not. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Today's story about ChatGPT doing a terrible job playing chess https://games.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org] is a great example of why this isn't going to be the case.
ChatGPT isn't a chess-playing engine. It doesn't know how to "do that job" at all. It can generate text that describes the game of chess, it can even generate text that describes specific moves in chess and how they are used. But none of that makes it *good at chess.*
The same goes for people's jobs. Just because it can describe a person's job, or aspects
CEO profiting from AI says AI not harmful (Score:2)
Beware men in uniformsâ¦.. (Score:2)
Nvidia guy always irritates me with his leather jacket uniform. Personal brand. Whatever. Seems like he is a bit high on his own supply. I AM STEVE JOBS! Just like the creepy blood test lady, beware of people who think this way.
(Yes, cynical ones, I have my own uniform of khakis and button down shirts. But at least the colors and the patterns change from day to day!)
New jobs at most for 20 years, after that... (Score:2)
I have looked at the data for the past 15 years. Some work like healthcare and IT are going up and some work like manufacturing are going down. The total amount of work is declining steadily at the speed of about 0,4% of population losing a job every year. This is not actual job loss, as I am looking at hours of work done and estimating the amount of jobs based on the hours, because some jobs are short term, some have only few hours etc.
Problem is not about inventing new jobs. Problem is finding new custome
Technology never reduces the number of jobs. (Score:2)
It is true that technology does eliminate old jobs, but there are an unlimited amount of jobs in the 'que' so to speak.
There is no set amount of jobs. Jobs are determined by people's desires. If you have money and a desire, those combine to become a job. Those new jobs create money. (basic economic theory - jobs create money, not the other way around. Simplest thing to think of me paying you lets you pay other people, who can pay other people, so $10 being spent once ends up being spent 4,5, or who know
Re: (Score:1)
Nonesense (Score:1)
MAGA friendly AI panic from Axios (Score:2)
This piece wasn’t greenlit by the editors at Axios because it informs. It was greenlit because Axios gets paid every time a MAGA nutbar in a policymaking role virtue-signals to the base by linking to it, or a brachiating tech bro gibbers with excitement at their ‘analysis’ and swings back for more.
Pick something in the news, link it to government inaction, cherry-pick some data, and close with a scare-mongering rhetorical flourish. Here’s the Axios article, in a bucket:
AI Fraud is the real danger (Score:2)
So...what's it good for?...beyond playing around, it's only good for creating stuff where either a human being is carefully inspecting the output or you just don't care about accuracy or correctness....basically fraud & spam.
I
Machines should replace humans (Score:2)
A job that can be replaced by a machine and increase ROI, meaning the overall cost of the machine is less... Or if a job is distasteful enough or dangerous enough a human shouldn't do it, we have an ethical duty to use the machine instead.
We will replace humans far more rapidly over the next 10 years than ever before. The job market won't keep up. We should expect to see national emergencies and a lot of discord.