It is all entirely advertising. Anything they say. Of course they want all companies to require their engineers to not think anymore and just press accept on their software. It's how they make money. Most c suite is absolutely deluded enough to believe them too.
They are offering a cure to the defining contradiction of capitalism: The tension between capital wanting maximal self-reproduction and labor wanting a fair wage and a good life.
Anthropics pitch is to finally redeem capitalism by getting rid of those annoying workers and their annoying demands - that is why C-Suites are so excited about it, that is why its talked about in messianic language.
It is even worse than feudalism.
Their “utopia” doesn’t need an economy nor does it need a population.
Feudalism indeed relied on its population and on its primitive economy.
I think Thiel (could have been another billionaire) twitched when asked by a reporter if he will be sad if AI overtakes humanity and humanity disappears. And not the good kind of twitch, more like "it's fine if it happens if I'm uploaded to the matrix by then" kind of twitch.
Hard agree. Why else are they writing manifestos and talking about the antichrist...
To the poster below who thinks anthropic is in this to destroy capitalism(lmao rofl), I guess maybe if you are interested in fuedal societies run by people who currently bomb schools, have chatbots and finely tuned recommendation engines designed to make children commit suicide but only after extracting as much capital as possible beforehand, try to sway elections in foreign countries, theottle the Internet so dictators can win wars, etc. Yea sure man they are all definitely interested in making the world better for everyone by also automating one of the few middle class jobs available in a country which has no manufacturing to fall back on. Super normal timeline.
Where I work we make real hardware and software that are used by real people doing real jobs every day. We use AI but in that environment someone who made Jackobriens comment would be seen as an idiot, someone who doesn't have a clue how to build software with real users that has to work with few bugs and be maintainable.
But there are so many people who make statements like his that maybe we should assume that some of them are not idiots or bots. If he's not an idiot it means that he's working in an environment where that kind of statement is paying off. So it could be, for example, that he doesn't really have profitable customers. His main 'customers' are investors who are clueless, or who know that they are clueless but don't care because they are going to move it on to a greater fool anyway. Or that because there aren't any customers, the only thing they can measure is 'productivity' in terms of 'number of unused, unprofitable and unsustainable features'
I work with AI as well and it can help, but it can also hurt. I think any objective person agrees with that.
There is another option to consider. What if they heard someone else say it and they believed it.
Now they go around, like many insecure people do, shouting about their unfounded take. Begging the universe to correct them or give them a good reason why they arent informed.
Then what usually happens with people who suffer from this type of short ordered thinking is, they realize they can't walk it back without social consequences because of the shouting they have done. So they just double down on it and find ways to live with the cognitive dissonance. Anthropic, openai, etc make billions off of people like this.
Because they propagate the BS advertising to people who don't know better, and then spend more money to try to make it real.
Well anthropic says you are wrong and wants juniors to disappear into another trade. This absolutely wouldn't be a coordinated effort to deskill Americans and force companies to helplessly accept whatever LLM code is generated without human review. Most certainly not. They wouldn't target regulated industries that require certain work praxis like biotechnology and lobby heavily with the military and government to change laws around this. Definitely not!
What would Anthropic gain by wanting juniors to disappear into another trade? Obviously their goal is to turn a profit meaning they need to be more efficient and they seem to believe that will come from senior engineers. They have the supply for it, why hire juniors when seniors are dying to working in your shop
This reminds me a bit of the gaming industry. In most AAA game studios, junior openings are very rare or simply non existent. Companies expect you to learn the ropes elsewhere and only show up when you're experienced.
As long as there other companies scooping up the juniors (which we cannot assume will happen), this could be sustainable.
Uh complete market capture for an entire industry that costs billions of dollars a year. They have been claiming software engineer was solved for years now.
If everyone does it, no one monitors it anymore, and quality degrades the only way out is more tokens.
Bingo. From day one what these companies have really been after is not "intelligence" but rather mass production and the concomitant quality expectation and behavioral shifts that go with it.
All they really need to do is convince enough people to adopt lower expectations and accept worse software products. At that point, mission accomplished. They've annihilated the source of value originally provided by people who actually know how to do things.
Maybe you are more likely to buy things when benchmarks are honest, but openai and anthropic have been cheating at those for years. They get purchased a lot. Most purchases are emotional things, even for technical products. That's why they sell llms like it's crack, a weapon, or if you don't you will starve to death in the future. One thing I like about the Chinese and euro labs is they don't market their products in harmful ways, but that's a tangent.
It's more or less all stupid anyways. Benchmarks can give someone and understanding of what a model was trained on but they don't explain tone, consistency, the type of answers, the restrictions, what the money is going to, how good it is on your task, etc.
Most use of llms is gambling. So a lot of people get hooked on their one machine or whatever despite all reasons to the contrary. Some of the most deranged LLM users I e encountered are hooked on a variety of models but still use ones from like 2 years ago for specific tasks for emotional reasons.
The truth is, for 99.999% of use cases the top 10 models are more or less interchangeable. Either they can mostly do what someone wants, or none of them should probably be used for that application even if s leading lab is advertising it.
It's absolutely insane that they can't keep track of a CLI application that makes shell calls. This is so far from rocket science even mentioning the term is misleading.
Yea not at all. There are dozens of oss Claude code clones written by 1 person with a few contributors that work as well if not better. So it's really not some massive challenge. A decent cs student with enough coffee could get 40% the way there in a week without any llms. The same can't be said for rocket building or even design...
What people believe are the core features has never been difficult to implement. Building "something like" Twitter or facebook or reddit has always been possible within a few days.
It's an iceberg, most of the complexity lies underneath the obvious stuff.
But in Twitter or Facebook, the complexity is not in the app but with the scale. How do you support the network, graph, querying, fetching, etc. That is not the case for a self-contained binary like Claude code CLI that talks to the same API irrespective of 100 people are using or 1M people are using around the world.
No like there are dozens of open source Claude code alternatives that are as good or better than Claude code. This isn't a theoretical thing. It's not new either.
Even then do we really have evidence that what they are doing is reasonable or practical for them at all? They are edging on like 3 9s uptime, what leaked of Claude code looked like soup, tons of security issues, they can't build a sandbox to save their company, and last I heard they aren't even profitable without adjusting their numbers for arbitrary things.
Think I'm good on taking advice from companies that aren't making money.
Exactly. What they’re doing, repeatedly, is setting a narrative that this is how software engineering should be. Always be reliant on tokens. Don’t worry about uptime or errors - agents can address it, don’t worry about security - agents can address it, don’t worry about code comprehension - agents will always be there for you.
If they're cash-flow positive with 75% of compute going to research and training, what do you think will happen to cash flow when they shift to 50-50 training-inference?
Because "pacing the frontier" is more about flipping on the money printer switch than it is about safety.
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