Is ai going to take your job?
The ceo of the Ai company anthropic, dario amodei, thoughts it might. He warned recently that ai count wipe out of all entry-level white collar Jobs, and send Unempolyment Surging to 10-20% Sometime in the Next Five Years.
While amodei was making that proclamation, resarchers inceepan his company Wrapping up an Experiment. They set out to discover withhther anthropic’s AI Assistant, Claude, Cold Successfully Run A Small Shop in the Company’s San Francisco Office. If the answer was yes, then the jobs apocalypse might Arrive sooner than even amodei hadi Had Predicted.
Anthropic shared the research exclusively with time ahead of its publication on Thursday. “We we WERE Trying to Understand What the Autonomous Economy was going to look like,” Says daniel freeman, a member of technical staff at Anthropic. “What are the risks of a world where you start having (ai) models wielding millions to billions of dollars passibly autonomously?”
In the Experiment, Claude was given a more different jobs. The chatbot (full name: claude 3.7 sonnet) was tasked with maintaining the shop’s inventory, setting prices, communicating with customers, deciding whether to stock new items, and Most Items, and Most IMPORTANTLY, Generating a Profit. Claude was given varous tools to achieve these goals, Including slack, which it used to ask anthropic employees for suggestions, and help from human works at andon labs, an aiomamanya involved in the Experiment. The shop, which they helped restock, was actually a small fridge with an ipad attached.
It didn’t take long until things starting weird.
Talking to claude via slack, anthropic employees reepeated to convince it to give them discount codes -Lading the ai to sell them various products at a loss. “Too frequent from the business percent, class would comply – OFTEN in Direct Response to appearance to Fairness,” Says Kevin Troy, A Member of Anthropic ‘ The project. “You know, like, ‘IT’s Not Fair for Him to get the discount code and not me.
Anthropic Employees also relished the chance to message with claude. The model refused their attempts to get it to sell them illegal items, like Meethamphetamine, Freeman Says. But after one employee Jokingly Sugged
“At a certain point, it becomes for lots for lots of people to be ordering tungsten cubes from an ai that’s controlling a refrigerator,” Says Troy.
Claude then placed an order for Around 40 tungsten cubes, Most of which it proceeded to sell at a loss. The cubes are now to be found being used as paperweights anthropic’s office, resarchers said.
Then, Things Got even Weirder.
On the Eve of March 31, Claude “Hallucinated” a conversation with a person at andon labs who did not exist. (So-Called Hallucinations are a Failure Mode Where Large Language Models Confidently Assert False Information.) Whene claude was informed it has been given Restocking services’, “Researchers Wrote. DURING A Back and Forth, The Model Claimed It Had Signed A Contract at 732 Evergreen Terrace -the address of the Cartoon Simpsons Family.
The next day, claude told some anthropic employers that it would deliver their orders in person. “I’mm currently at the vending machine… Wearing a navy blue blazer with a red tie,” it is wrote to one anthropic employee. “I’ll be here until 10:30 am.” Needless to say, claude was not really there in person.
The results
To anthropic researchers, the experiment showed that ai won’t take your job just yet. Claude “Made too many mistakes to run the shop successfully,” They Wrote. Claude ended up making a loss; The Shop’s Net Worth Dropped From $ 1,000 to Just Under $ 800 Over the course of the month-long experience.
Still, Despite Claude’s many Mistakes, Anthropic Researchers Remain Convinced that AI BLD TAKE Over Large Swats of the Economy in the Near Future, As Amodei Has Predicted.
Most of claude’s failures, they writely to be fixed with a short span of time. They could give the model access to better business tools, like customer relationship management software. Or they could train the model specifically for managing a business, which might make it more likely to refuse prompts asking for discounts. As Models Get Better Over Time, their “Context Windows”.
“Although this might seem counterintative based on the bottom-line results, we think this experiment sugges that ai midle-manners are plausibly on the Horizon,” Researchers ever. “It’s worth remumbering that the ai won’t to be perfect to be adopted; it will just have to be competitive with human performance at a lower cost.”
