Amid a new wave of anxiety about the ‘SaaSpocalypse’ that left global technology markets rattled, Anthropic’s president has said that human skills such as critical thinking and learning how to interact with people will be more important in the future.Daniela Amodei, the co-founder of the AI startup behind Claude, said that studying humanities will be more important than ever before because AI models are already good at STEM. “And what I mean by that is when we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people,” Amodei said in an interview with ABC News on February 7.
Acknowledging that there was no perfect solution for the potential AI-fueled automation of jobs, Amodei said, “The number of jobs that AI could do without help from people is vanishingly small.” “It’s not zero, especially around things like customer support but I think, for even some of the most cognitively challenging tasks, the ability to augment with AI will be very profound,” she added.
Amodei also said that “humans plus AI together actually create more meaningful work, more challenging work, more interesting work, high‑productivity jobs.”
Amodei’s remarks come days after Anthropic’s new suite of workplace automation tools triggered a massive sell-off of Indian IT stocks over concerns that AI can now perform tasks previously handled by human workers or traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms.
Shares of Indian IT majors, including Infosys, TCS and HCLTech, fell as investors worried about the long-term impact of such AI tools on traditional IT service companies. Investment bank Jefferies termed the episode a “SaaSpocalypse” – a reference to SaaS companies facing potential obsolescence.
Her view that fears of AI replacing humans were overstated contrasts with earlier warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who is also her brother. In a lengthy 20,000-word essay titled ‘The Adolescence of Technology’, Dario Amodei issued a fresh warning about the impact of AI on the job market, saying that it will cause “unusually painful” disruption bigger than any before.Story continues below this ad
“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,” he said in the blog post.
What else did Daniela Amodei say?
In the interview, Daniela Amodei also spoke about Anthropic’s recently aired Super Bowl ads poking fun at OpenAI’s ChatGPT and vowing to keep ads out of its Claude AI chatbot.
“This really isn’t intended to be about any other company other than us, and to be clear our view is not that all ads are bad or there’s never the right place or time for advertising. It felt to us like AI conversations are different, people are sometimes uploading private or confidential information to their AI tool and to us, it just didn’t feel like a respectful way to treat our users’ data,” she said.
When asked how Claude is different from its competitors’ models, Amodei referred to Anthropic’s recently published ‘Constitution for Claude’ framework. “The best way to think about it is, making the models helpful, honest, and harmless. How do we actually ensure that we stay at the frontier of model intelligence? If there’s one thing at the model layer, it’s this desire to make sure that our models are always as capable as possible without ever compromising on safety,” she said.Story continues below this ad
On the potential harms posed by AI chatbots, especially for underage users, Amodei reiterated that Anthropic does not allow under-18 users to sign up to use Claude.
“The reason for that today is just that we’re just not certain enough about what the impact is on children. It’s possible it could be completely safe and completely fine but the advent of this technology is so new that we would rather take a cautious tack in almost every area,” she said.
“That being said, I think there of course can be a place for talking to your kids about what AI is because it’s going to be a part of their lives,” she added.