AI is upending the job market, even at AI companies

Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger, who also cofounded Instagram, says the job market is going to be tough for new grads.

Krieger told The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast on Friday that Anthropic is focused instead on hiring experienced engineers. He said he still has “some hesitancy” with entry-level workers.

To some extent, that’s a reflection of Anthropic’s internal structure, which doesn’t yet support a “really good internship program,” Krieger said. Internships have long been the golden ticket to lucrative entry-level tech jobs.

But it also shows how AI is upending the labor market, even at AI companies. As AI continues to evolve, Krieger said that the role of entry-level engineers is going to shift.

On a recent episode of the 20VC podcast, Krieger said software engineers could see their job evolve in the next three years as coders outsource more of their work to AI. Humans will focus on “coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale — and that’s probably some combination of maybe a comeback of some static analysis or maybe AI-driven analysis tools of what was actually produced.”

There is an exception, however.

“If somebody was… extremely good at using Claude to do their work and map it out, of course, we would bring them on as well,” Steve Mnich, a spokesperson for Anthropic, told Business Insider by email. Claude, Anthropic’s flagship chatbot, has become known among users as a coding wizard with a manipulative streak. “So there is, I think, a continued role for people that have embraced these tools to make themselves, in many ways, as productive as a senior engineer.”

On its careers page, Anthropic is hiring for 200 roles across categories from AI research and engineering to communications and brand to software engineering infrastructure.

BI reviewed the job descriptions for each of these roles and found that the majority require five or more years of experience, while a handful of jobs, particularly in sales, require between 1 and 2 years of experience.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also warned about the threat AI poses to entry-level jobs, both inside and outside the AI industry.

In an interview with Axios, Amodei said the technology could wipe out as much as 50% of entry-level jobs. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” he told the outlet. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”

On Thursday, he told CNN that “AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it.”

David Hsu, the CEO of Retool, an AI application company with over 10,000 customers, including Boston Consulting Group, AWS, and Databricks, is also warning of changes on the horizon. He told BI that “workers have a lot of leverage over CEOs” in the current labor market. “I think CEOs are kind of tired of that. They’re like, ‘We need to get to the point where we can go replace labor with AI.'”

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