Mistral AI CEO says AI’s biggest threat is people getting lazy

As tech leaders continue to debate the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the job market, one CEO says the technology’s biggest risk may be “deskilling.”

In an interview with The Times of London, Arthur Mensch, the CEO of the Paris-based firm Mistral AI, dismissed the idea that AI would lead to huge cuts to white-collar jobs, saying the bigger risk was that people may become progressively lazier as they increasingly rely on the tech to search for information.

Speaking to the outlet at the VivaTech conference in Paris earlier this month, Mensch, who cofounded the open-source large language model developer alongside Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix in April 2023, said that a key way to avoid this would be to ensure humans remained actively involved in reviewing and critiquing AI output.

“It’s a risk that you can avoid, if you think of it from a design perspective, if you make sure that you have the right human input, that you keep the human active,” he said, adding that he believed it was important humans did not take AI output as the “truth.”

“You want people to continue learning,” he continued. “Being able to synthesize information and criticize information is a core component to learning.”

Mensch, a former Google DeepMind researcher, also responded to recent warnings that AI poses a threat to white-collar jobs, including from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who recently said that AI could replace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.

“I think it’s very much of an overstatement,” Mensch said, adding that he believed Amodei liked to “spread fear” about AI as a marketing tactic.

Instead, Mensch said he thought AI would change white-collar jobs. “I do expect that we’ll have more relational tasks because that’s not something you can easily replace,” he said.

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