Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, during an interactive session at the World Economic Forum, warned about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on jobs. He said he thinks AI could do the work software engineers currently do in 6 to 12 months.
“I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any codes anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it. I do the things around it,” Amodei said while in a discussion with Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief, The Economist. They were joined by Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.
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Talking about the advancement of AI and its impact on jobs, Amodei said, “I think… I don’t know… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs (software engineers) do end to end.” He added, “Then it’s a question of how fast does that loop close.”
He then goes on to discuss the components of the “loop” that cannot be achieved by AI, including chip manufacturing and model training. He continued, “I think there’s a lot of uncertainty.
Social media reacts:
Amodei’s remarks prompted a series of responses on social media. An individual commented, “Anthropic CEO: ‘Software Engineering Will Be Automatable in 12 Months’. Yeah, we’re cooked.” Another remarked, “Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI models will be able to do 'most, maybe all' of what software engineers do end-to-end within 6 to 12 months, shifting engineers to editors.”
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A third added, “WOW, an incredibly rich CEO making unverifiable claims which further his own interests in a media interview. This is very rare and a HUGE deal. Let's all believe him.” A fourth wrote, “This isn’t a fad anymore. The clocks are ticking. What's your plan?”
Before serving as the CEO of Anthropic, an AI research company, Dario Amodei worked as the Vice President of Research at OpenAI. Prior to that, he worked at Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist.