Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

"Massive disruption" of what kind? Current AI abilities make white-collar work more productive and potentially higher-paid, not less.

>Who gets the nice car and the vacation home?

AI will crash the price of manufactured goods. Since all prices are relative, the price of rivalrous goods will rise. A car will be cheap. A lakeside cabin will be cheap. A cottage in the Hamptons will be expensive. Superbowl tickets will be a billion dollars each.

>meager universal basic income allotment

What does a middle class family spend its money on? You don't need a house within an easy commute of your job, because you won't have one. You don't need a house in a good school district, because there's no point in going to school. No need for the red queen's race of extracurriculars that look good on a college application, or to put money in a "college fund", because college won't exist either.

The point of AI isn't that it's going to blow up some of the social order, but that it's going to blow up the whole thing.

Friends and others who have described the details of their non-technical white collar work to me over the last 15 or so years have typically evoked the unspoken response... "Hmm, I could probably automate about 50-80% of your job in a couple weeks." That's pre-AI. And yet years later, they would still have similar jobs with repetitive computer work.

So I'm quite confident the future will be similar with AI. Yes, in theory, it could already replace perhaps 90% of the white collar work in the economy. But in practice? It will be a slow, decades-long transition as old-school / less tech savvy employers adopt the new processes and technologies.

Junior software engineers trying to break into high paying tech jobs will be hit the hardest hit IMO, since employers are tech savvy, the supply of junior developers is as high as ever, and they simply will take too long to add more value than using Claude unless you have a lot of money to burn on training them.

I’m very skeptical of claims that all things will always do this and never do that, etc.

IMO Jensen and others don’t know where AI is going any more than the rest of us. Your imaginary dystopia is certainly possible, but I would warn against having complete conviction it is the only possible outcome.

That backlash is already happening. Which is why we are seeing the rise in right wing extremism. People are voting for change. The problem is they’re also voting for the very establishment they’re protesting against.

> base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history.

We used to just call that lying.

> When AI finally does cause massive disruption to white collar work

It has to exist first. Currently you have a chat bot that requires terabytes of copyrighted data to function and has sublinear increases in performances for exponential increases in costs. These guys genuinely seem to be arguing over a dead end.

> what happens then?

What happened when gasoline engines removed the need to have large pools of farm labor? It turns out people are far more clever than a "chat bot" and entire new economies became invented.

> that we see some form of swift and punitive backlash, politically or otherwise.

Or people just move onto the next thing. It's hilarious how small imaginations become when "AI" is being discussed.

> and a pretty short view of history

Great lets see an example!

> To claim that all of the benefit isn't going to naturally accrue to a thin layer of people at the top isn't a speculation at this point - it's a bold faced lie.

Except that innovation has lead to more jobs, new industries, and more prosperity and fewer working hours. The stark example of this: you arent a farmer: https://modernsurvivalblog.com/systemic-risk/98-percent-of-a...

Your shirts arent a weeks or a months income: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt...

Go back to the 1960's when automation was new. It was an expensive, long running failure for GM to put in those first robotic arms. Today there are people who have CNC shops in their garage. The cost of starting that business up is in the same price range as the pickup truck you might put in there. You no longer need accountants, payroll, and your not spending as much time doing these things yourself its all software. You dont need to have a retail location, or wholesale channels, build your website, app, leverage marketplaces and social media. The reality is that it is cheaper and easier than ever to be your own business... and lots of people are figuring this out and thriving.

> Do we really think that most of the American economy is just going to downshift

No I think my fellow Americans are going to scream and cry and hold on to dying ways of life -- See coal miners.

I've been trying every flavor of AI powered development and after trying Claude Code for two days with an API key, I upgraded to the full Max 20x plan.

Cursor, Windsurf, Roo Code / Cline, they're fine but nothing feels as thorough and useful to me as Claude Code.

The Codex CLI from OpenAI is not bad either, there's just something satisfying about the LLM straight up using the CLI

I find it's good if you can get a really clean context, but on IRL problems with 100k+ lines of code that's extremely hard to manage.

It absolutely aced an old take-home test I had though - https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/

But note the problems it got wrong are troubling, especially the off-by-one error the first time as that's the sort of thing a human might not be able to validate easily.

> Finally gave Claude a go after trying OpenAI a while and feeling pretty _meh_ about the coding ability... Wow, it's a whole other level or two ahead,

I’ve been avoiding LLM-coding conversations on popular websites because so many people tried it a little bit 3-6 months ago, spot something that doesn’t work right, and then write it off completely.

Everyone who uses LLM tools knows they’re not perfect, they hallucinate some times, their solutions will be laughably bad to some problems, and all the other things that come with LLMs.

The difference is some people learn the limits and how to apply them effectively in their development loop. Other people go in looking for the first couple failures and then declare victory over the LLM.

There are also a lot of people frustrated with coworkers using LLMs to produce and submit junk, or angry about the vibe coding glorification they see on LinkedIn, or just feel that their careers are threatened. Taking the contrarian position that LLMs are entirely useless provides some comfort.

Then in the middle, there are those of us who realize their limits and use them to help here and there, but are neither vibe coding nor going full anti-LLM. I suspect that’s where most people will end up, but until then the public conversations on LLMs are rife with people either projecting doomsday scenarios or claiming LLMs are useless hype.

Yup, Claude Code is the real deal. It's a massive force multiplier for me. I run a small SaaS startup. I've gotten more done in the last month than the previous 3 months or more combined. Not just code, but also emails, proposals, planning, legal etc. I feel like working in slo-mo when Claude is down (which unfortunately happens every couple of days). I believe that tools like Claude code will help smaller companies disproportionately.

I purchased Max a week ago and have been using it a lot. Few experiences so far:

- It generates slop in high volume if not carefully managed. It's still working, tested code, but easily illogical. This tool scares me if put in the hands of someone who "just wants it to work".

- It has proven to be a great mental block remover for me. A tactic i've often had in my career is just to build the most obvious, worst implementation i can if i'm stuck, because i find it easier to find flaw in something and iterate than it is to build a perfect impl right away. Claude makes it easy to straw man a build and iterate it.

- All the low stakes projects i want to work on but i'm too tired to after real work have gotten new life. It's updated library usage (Bevy updates were always a slog for me), cleaned up tooling and system configs, etc.

- It seems incapable of seeing the larger picture on why classes of bugs happen. Eg on a project i'm Claude Code "vibing" on, it's made a handful of design issues that started to cause bugs. It will happily try and fix individual issues all day rather than re-architect to make a less error prone API. Despite being capable to actually fix the API woes if prompted to. I'm still toying with the memory though, so perhaps i can get it to reconsider this behavior.

- Robust linting, formatting and testing tools for the language seem necessary. My pet peeve is how many spaces the LLM will add in. Thankfully cargo-fmt clears up most LLM gunk there.

Jensen is right, though. If we force China to develop their own technology they’ll do that! We don’t have a monopoly on talent or resources. The US can have a stake at the table or nothing at all. The time when we, the US, could do protectionism without shooting ourselves in the foot is well and truly over. The most we can do is inconvenience China in the short term.

> It's early days and nobody knows how things will go, but to me it looks that in the next century or so

How is it early days? AI has been talked about since at least the 50s, neural networks have been a thing since the 80s.

If you are worried about how technology will be in a century, why stop right here? Why not take the state of computers in the 60s and stop there?

Chances are, if the current wave does not achieve strong AI the there will be another AI winter and what people will research in 30 or 40 or 100 years is not something that our current choices can affect.

Therefore the interesting question is what happens short-term not what happens long-term.

> …to me it looks that in the next century or so humans are going the way of the horse, at least when it comes to jobs.

I’m not sure. I think we can extrapolate that repetitive knowledge work will require much less labor. For actual AGI capable of applying rigor, I don’t think it clear that the computational requirements are achievable without a massive breakthrough. Also for general purpose physical tasks, humans are still pretty dang efficient at ~100watts and self maintaining.

We have only been selling our labor for a couple of hundred years. Humanity has been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

We will manage. Hey, we can always eat the rich!

This is exactly right. LLMs do not build appropriate world models. And no...python and JS have similar failure cases.

Still, sometimes it can solve a problem like magic. But since it does not have a world model it is very unreliable, and you need to be able to fall back to real intelligence (i.e., yourself).

I agree, but i think the thing we often miss in these discussions is how much LLMs have potential to be productivity multipliers.

Yea, they still need to improve a bit - but i suspect there will be a point at which individual devs could be getting 1.5x more work done in aggregate. So if everyone is doing that much more work, it has potential to "take the job" of someone else.

Yea, software is being needed more and more and more, so perhaps it'll just make us that much more dependent on devs and software. But i do think it's important to remember that productivity always has potential to replace devs, and LLMs imo have huge potential in productivity.

Sonnet or Opus? Well, I guess they both still can do that. But I'm just keeping on asking it to review all its code. To make sure it works. Eventually, it'll catch its errors.

Now this isn't a viable way of working if you're paying for this token-by-token, but with the Claude Code $200 plan ... this thing can work for the entire day, and you will get a benefit from it. But you will have to hold its hand quite a bit.

> assuming iterator stability in a vector that was being modified

This is the crux of an interview question I ask, and you’d be amazed how many experienced cpp devs require heavy hints to get it

(not trolling) Would that undefined behavior have occurred in idiomatic rust?

Will the ability to use AI to write such a solution correctly be enough motivation to push C++ shops to adopt rust? (Or perhaps a new language that caters to the blindspots of AI somehow)

There will absolutely be a tipping point where the potential benefits outweigh the costs of such a migration.

I agree. That mental model is precisely why I don’t use LLMs for programming.

This is where one can notice that LLM are, after all, just stochastic parrots. If we don't have a reliable way to systematically test their outputs, I don't see many jobs being replaced by AI either.

a difference emerges when an agent can run code and examine the results. Most platforms are very cautious about this extension. Recent MCP does define toolsets and can enable these feedback loops in a way that can be adopted by markets and software ecosystems.

Unemployment will be a serious risk indeed once the current AI bubble bursts and we enter a new economic downturn. As it is, AI-generated unemployment is just FUD.

In the Big Short movie there is a scene where the old trader scolds two newbies: "why are you so happy? don't you understand that if your bet is right, it means the american economy is going to crash, that millions will lose their jobs?"

Right now we're betting on sp500 going up, which is mostly backed by the belief that machines are going to replace us soon.