WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
As companies fight over the future of AI Anthropic thinks it’s lots of small AIs working together in a corporate-like structure.
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The future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may involve more of a corporate takeover than a robot uprising, according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei recently discussed the future of AI in an interview with Noah Smith and Erik Torenbergon the Econ 102 podcast. The trio touched on everything from the military use of AI to replacing human workers with more efficient machines.
Amodei also discussed the company’s inside efforts to develop an efficient hierarchical structure for completing tasks via a network of AI models.
The AI most people are familiar with today comes in the form of chatbots and image generators. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are state-of-the-art AI systems that, independently, have cost tens of billions of dollars to develop. But most useful applications for the technology underpinning these systems don’t require their full capabilities. For example, using Claude to help generate Python code for a Web 3.0 application will not use the model’s ability to generate poetry in French.
As Amodei described in the interview, the company’s current thinking appears to involve swarms of AI Agents capable of networking to complete specific tasks.
The basic premise would involve “big models orchestrating small models.” Amodei added that the larger models would create up to hundreds of smaller, faster, more efficient models to perform tasks. While Amodei used the analogy of worker bees supporting their queen, what he described sounds similar to a typical corporate structure.
At the top would be the core Claude model, Anthropic’s most powerful system. Underneath that would be several expensive, foundational models trained in wide-area domains such as math, programming and sentiment analysis. Beneath those “C-Suite machines” would be a litany of specialty models dedicated to completing specific tasks. Finally, under the middle-manager specialists, we’d find the entry-level, one-off models designed for short-term use.
This design could potentially benefit end-users at every level by allowing them to access the specific capabilities they need through a single, simple user interface.
