Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
A new AI startup formed from the exits of some of the industry’s biggest, most ethically questionable players says it’s building the technology with humanity’s best interests strictly in mind.
Called Humans — that’s its real name, not a typo — the organization’s founders say their vision is to build AI that empowers people rather than trying to replace their jobs. new York Times reportsLike building collaboration software that works like an “AI version of an instant messaging app.”
According to reporting, this nonpareil vision has helped Humans raise $480 million in seed funding despite launching just three months ago. Given its $4.48 billion valuation, its investors include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos and Google Ventures – ethical paragons of human empowerment.
One of the founders is Andy Peng, a research scientist at Anthropic, which builds chatbot clouds, and whose CEO Dario Amodei casually predicted that the technology he was helping to develop would replace more than half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. At some point, Peng no longer saw eye to eye philosophically with her former employer.
“Anthropic is training its models to work autonomously. It likes to highlight how its models brainstorm alone for eight hours, 24 hours, 50 hours to complete a task,” Peng explained. NYT. “That was never my inspiration. I see machines and humans as complementary to each other.”
The two other founders, Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, hail from Elon Musk’s Now freed from the shackles of Musk leadership, Zelikman is imagining an AI beyond chatbots like Grok.
“AI has immense potential to allow people to do more together,” Zelikman explained. NYT. “The current paradigm – questioning and answering – will not get us there.”
Typically, tech companies don’t say they’re building AI to disenfranchise working humans, and perhaps couch what’s to come with euphemisms like “enhancing productivity.” Still, they acknowledge the technology’s disruptive effects, even if only for the sake of talking about how amazing AI will be in the long run. Along with Anthropic’s Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicts that AI will erase entire categories of labor. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella has expressed concerns that AI could make his entire company obsolete, with him claiming about 30 percent of the company’s code is written with AI. Meanwhile, customers of these companies are openly bragging about replacing employees with their AI models.
The barely disguised self-deprecation with which AI leaders operate may have provided a window to entrepreneurs to deliver more human messages, in good faith or not in good faith, naively or cynically.
“There are some very clear principles that designers are starting to adopt in favor of a human-centered approach,” said Ben Schneiderman, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland and a proponent of “human-centered” AI. NYT. “It goes back to the basic principle of ensuring human control.”
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