If anyone doubts this, consider that Anthropic considers its TAM to exceed $30 trillion which is nearly the entire GDP of the US and 25% of the world GDP.
Only makes sense if they believe they will massively replace labor. Which, to their credit, they used to admit openly and publicly and only stopped because some crisis PR people told them "hey maybe you shouldn't say the quiet part out loud while the hoi polloi still have the power to stop this from happening".
You're not this naive are you?
Amazing, truly.
They have practically infinite investor money to throw at salaries (lost in the noise of how much they are spending on compute) so why not use it for now to reach their goal as fast as possible?
My thesis isn't that they have already achieved the ability to replace massive amounts of the labor pool, just that that has to be their goal given their stated TAM.
> If they want to flex the power of their models to automate human jobs, why not lead by example?
They don't want to flex this. They realized (after a false start) that it is better for them to avoid talking about this in public.
That doesn't mean their goals changed, they just realized that flexing before the goal is achieved could endanger the goal being achieved through political backlash.
Wouldn't throwing that money into GPU be better because AI is smarter and faster ? So they would reach their goal even faster ?
Regulated fields - another clueless poster lol.
I know many of you really hate whats happening but don't try and project it on other professions where the environment is different.
Society largely never cared about maths.
You are, of course, right that doctors, lawyers and accountants have more control over the environment they work in compared to mathematicians. But it doesn't change the underlying argument Tao is making. Your observation that those professions will react differently is likely to be true and only time will tell how effective their response will be.
But AI "assistants" is a marketing approach being made to all professionals at this time. Tao is implying this is a Trojan-horse strategy. If you let the assistants in without reasonable protections, you may lose control over the environment you are trying to protect.
Out of sheer, idle curiosity: were you actually laughing when you typed that out?
lol. lmao even.
I guess there is a first time for everything.
As one of the smartest people in the world, he is so naive to believe that those capitalists will stop at that.
They also had a rich starting point from open source code (which we somehow gave up without realising it). All of this won't happen as efficiently for these other fields, but it will happen, much in the way you've described. We (swes) turned out to be a rather dumb group of people, which is hilarious since we think we're clever.
The only moat we have is the human to human element, we need to talk to other humans in the business. Customers, etc. But once they're replaced by machines or automation, then machine to machine communication will be the preferred mode of communication and work and the legacy humans will be increasingly cut out of the loop. Human in the loop is a death sentence we just don't realise it.
> The companies are saying these tools will assist professionals, but in reality they are aiming to replace them.
They are openly saying that the goal is to replace humans and make humans obsolete. Like, literally openly. I am not saying I agree with that goal or find it realistic, but they do think so.
“AI won't replace humans. But humans who use AI will replace those who don't.”
vs
"Some areas in the job market will be 'just like totally, totally gone' as they're replaced by AI agents.”
and
“AI will probably replace most of the jobs people do today,”
The most recent position I could find says he has revised his earlier position on a total replacement due to the lagging adoption of AI in many industries. But I don't think there is a single position we can point to that they are "openly saying". It is fair to grant even the CEOs of these companies a change in position as they gain more information about capabilities and adoption, rather than insist that they hold, have held and will continue to hold fixed opinions.
The point is that Tao's understanding has changed. He may have been naive before, he may have heard in their words something he wanted to believe. Perhaps he was misled by people who he trusted that worked in the company. But now that he has more evidence, in the form of the maths drops and the way they have been handled, his suspension of disbelief no longer holds. The companies could have done this in a way that included mathematicians, so they chose not to. And that choice reveals their aims unambiguously in a way that a media-trained CEO or careful PR department can avoid.
That suggests that Tao is not being "self-serving" as others claim. He is saying that his optimism in the best-case scenario turned out to be incorrect.
Consider any man at his job, fighting the good fight. Your boss says "I've hired this man to assist you" and you are happy to finally have some help with your difficult task. Then one morning you come into work and see that the coming day’s work was done overnight by this other fellow. And the realization sinks in, he isn't there to help you, he is there to replace you.
In this view his reaction seems totally expected. I expect many professionals, e.g. doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. will make this realization sooner or later. The companies are saying these tools will assist professionals, but in reality they are aiming to replace them.