Claude Corps
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So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits.... but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
> So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits....
Being forward deployed engineer is to work with a particular business helping them out with the solution that your tech company du jour makes.
> but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
I didn't really get the impression that they work for Anthropic as it is a 12 month thing and then it's done. So you're not seen as something long-term, nor do you get one of those juicy tech salaries (which I'd assume is something that Anthropic pays if they see you as a long-term fit).
Whether you find that shady is up to you. I didn't even think that far ahead mate.
They mostly built phone apps oriented to public good projects. (So would just be using Claude Code to build the app itself, they wouldn't be calling Anthropic APIs behind the scenes, at least for those projects.)
Think $85k for an entry level gig subsidized by Anthropic. What is so bad about that?
> We are not seeking job displacement. We are working to prevent or minimize it. Some amount of displacement, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.
> Whatever happens, we are on the side of people. We are trying to solve these problems. We take no satisfaction in contributing to them, and we are not working to make them more likely.
The cognitive dissonance/doublespeak/hypocrisy (pick one) is absolutely insane.
They are concurrently:
1. creating and marketing products that are explicitly trying to automate, if not entire professions, at least big parts of them
2. edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
3. directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it preachy and hypocritical? Yeah. And I've yet to hear anyone suggest something better.
While I reject their basic premise and think it is more marketing garbage, the answer sure as shit isn’t to try to monopolize the technology so that Anthropic can extract maximum rents from it.
They are proposing solutions to a hypothetical problem they are actively trying to manifest into reality to get more capital and funding.
That's what hypocritical about it. Not the development of the technology nor the effort to lobby for more regulations and policies.
The general discourse around AI could be much more sensible and pragmatic and lead to a more balanced, healthy rollout of the technology in society. But of course this means forfeiting at least part of the massive injection of capital in those companies and the ecosystem in the short-term.
If I don’t rob my neighbour, someone else is going to do it
Yet at the same time, they are a public benefit corporation, and I'm not quite sure what that means? Is that a separate legal entity from the for-profit arm?
There is also a separate legal entity (Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust) that owns some shares and has special powers, but shareholders can change that so I wouldn't trust the trust too much.
Companies going out of business, either because of disruption, or because they ran themselves poorly, or other reasons, is part of the normal business cycle. Otherwise, we'd end up doing things like making digital cameras illegal because the people who worked in film labs lost their jobs. (Which is absurd!)
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I don't see any cognitive dissonance in what you quote. Some people will lose jobs to AI. Anthropic wants to train people who lose jobs to AI.
They are recognizing themselves in their economic policy framework that the lowest level of unemployment potentially caused would be 5% (they also mention 10% and "unprecedented levels of unemployment").
I don't think there is a precedent for this claim. It's hard to take the "we're a force for good for humanity" message seriously in this context.
Talk to news companies, which whether newspapers, magazines, radio or TV, are basically either literally gone, or a shadow of their former selves. The best way to compare this, as you say is to even larger constructs, to entire sectors of the economy.
Because you can harken this to desktop computers, or to the Internet. Sector after sector of people replaced, industries gone. Just the sheer amount of newsprint, recycled or not, which is now no longer manufactured affected an enormous amount of jobs. The entire forest industry, to sawmill, to shipping + printing and all the parts and maintenance and delivery and even the newstands which are basically now gone. Good for the environment or not, that's massive change.
I agree AI will do the very same. But it's not even really happening that much faster. We're 3 years in. It will take 10 to 20 years for it to play out.
But... back in 2008, would you have said the Internet was "bad" for humanity? No, you wouldn't. Back then, it was all about connecting people, it was about empowering people in totalitarian regimes, so they could connect and speak out. It was about old controls slipping, about people being able to speak directly to one another. Back then, 99.999% of people thought "awesome!".
And when I talk to the average Joe about AI today? I hear the same thing. Awesome!
The Internet has put countless people out of work. So has the computer. So has electricity. And machines. People have always complained. But if you're going to label AI companies as "They took my job!", then you'd better do the same for all those other industries. Otherwise?
It's a bit hypocritical.
They are not, the disruption itself becoming the praiseworthy goal was not there initially. Initially, the rhetoric was about creating new things, building companies and booming economy.
It changed into disruption only later. At some point, disrupting became the praised thing, even if you was in the loss the whole time and did not really produced anything better.
> edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
Your own job, assuming you're in the software industry, is to automate and eliminate people's jobs. How many jobs do you think it has eliminated? Do you feel you are responsible for your products? Is it ethical to do your job without thinking about and discussing its impacts?
My take: being also in the industry, software has created way more jobs, new businesses, new fields than the jobs it has eliminated. Nobody knows how AI will turn out, it being still at the beginning, although it will certainly have big impact and job displacement will be substantial. The hope is that it will be net plus for the society. At least Anthropic is talking about it. I never heard of, for example DeepSeek's position about the impacts of their products.
> directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
If you've volunteered for non-profits, you'd find that many of them are underfunded AND understaffed. Removing burdens on any part of their work, especially areas that aren't directly related to their core services, is hugely beneficial. It's easy to criticize from behind the keyboard.
Unfortunately opinions like yours scratch an itch of the HN crowd. Regardless of objectivity.
This is a common trope from the LLM crowd. Places I have worked for as a software engineer have created more jobs (gig economy) or improved the human condition (edtech in emerging markets) or helped people in refugee camps in Kenya stay connected.
Even in questionable companies, I focus on work that makes sure the technology is accessible to any and everyone. I became a programmer because I thought I could help make the world a better place.
> The hope is that it will be net plus for the society.
Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy.
Looking at my career, literally none. For real.
> Is it ethical to do your job without thinking about and discussing its impacts?
I am not saving the planet nor people. I am not social worker, doctor nor anyone like that. But, I am not harming them either.
> At least Anthropic is talking about it. I never heard of, for example DeepSeek's position about the impacts of their products.
No, DeepSeek is not trying to create FOMO and fear based sales. DeepSeek is not pushing insulting ads on me and scary ads on my CEO. I dont even think they are all that much more ethical as a business necessarily, but oh my god, they managed to avoid the most off-putting propaganda in places where I see.
For example?
Most of the products they build seem to be tools rather than replacements.
It also goes without saying that a certain segment of jobs are simply bullshit jobs that are prone to automation anyways. But without those jobs, you're also cutting off a segment of the population from the economy.
They all have PTSD from the status quo.
Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more self-serve, that is a step forward. Again, even if it just feels more agentic, that's a step forward -- maybe even if they end up screwing things up more in the process -- because the lack agency with their tech is so demoralizing in the sector
They ran on ancient hand-me down Windows PCs, with a donated HP server, fully on-prem. The MS licences they got from some government/MS program for free (not sure).
It was kinda crappy, but it did the job, there were some databases, Active Directory, some CRUD stuff to manage the internal workings of the shelter, and a locally hosted website.
But it cost nothing to run besides the electricity, and it did the job.
If we were to replicate the same system on top of SOTA AWS hardware, it would cost thousands of dollars per month, which would be a significant part of their operating budget.
Considering how much they actually needed every cent, I shudder at the thought.
Definitely with you here.
> Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more self-serve
Umm... so your plan to make non-profits less fucked is to give them yet another consultancy, but this one is AI!
I am dubious that this results in them feeling less fucked.
Eh, I bet an intern with AI could build some internal tooling stuff for the non-profit that they use for years. Same as they’ve been using, unedited, that one Excel sheet someone wrote in 1995.
If they're not using this opportunity to train other staff then that seems like a management problem.
-- edit --
After more reading I find this really funny: "Enforcement and regulatory authority with teeth. The government should be able to block or deter the deployment of models that pose a significant risk of catastrophic harm. We must also avoid overly broad or heavy-handed regulatory power. Our framework proposes both a mechanism for blocking dangerous deployments, and concrete safeguards that would prevent that power from being misused. Policymakers could begin with a lighter-touch approach, then adapt this as model capabilities advance and the evaluation ecosystem matures." (They link to https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential in this blog post)
That said, there are things people had to worry about last year with weaker models that aren't really a problem anymore, so some of the knowledge you get by "keeping up" becomes obsolete and could be skipped by waiting.
So, it seems to me that there's quite a lot of skill to using these "god boxes": which models, connecting to your systems, hosting the code, running the model, running the code, not breaking your production pipelines, having a production pipeline in the first place.
Sure, the god boxes help with a lot of that. But they don't help setting up the accounts, connecting your code hosting to your production servers. You can't currently just give random people in your org access to an LLM account and have them safely make production changes w/out some engineering knowledge and oversight. In NGOs, especially the small ones, they already outsource all that to 3rd parties so they don't have to worry about it. But with "just the right amount" of in-house knowledge, gear, config (maybe one office computer hooked up with Claude, or a small GHCP account, with GH + hosting configured), it's possible that anyone in the company might be able to add to the company's suite of useful small tools, or add features.
(I also think there's more to "hey claude, make feature X" than we're capturing here, but as I said at the top, I might be doing it wrong.)
I think the answer is the shouters are just telling people what they want to hear (a.k.a. lying), in the service of selling more. To the capitalists, they sell "god boxes" with the promise of one day being able to lay of most if not all those pesky, annoying workers. To the workers, they sell "something that you can gain expertise around" to defuse the intense opposition a job-destroying "got box" would create.
idgi. I'm pretty sure this is also exactly what they've been telling enterprise. This has been the line I've been hearing consistently from them (and everyone else).
Plenty of charity nonprofits have no/few employees and depend on volunteers for office work. Think animal shelter, food bank, etc. Having a bot perform things like bookkeeping, volunteer coordination, etc would free up volunteers for other things. It wouldn't take many tokens.
If Anthropic wanted some serious PR karma they would include a light usage plan for five or ten years in addition to the engineer to get them started.
Agents connect to your business software. A chat box alone can't "generate the monthly report, run the payroll, and contact these new volunteers."
Are they physical work? Maybe you're saying they aren't important?
A lot of nonprofits could benefit from someone helping them implement AI and most are 1) competent enough to ensure the fellow hands off their projects before they leave, and 2) to decide if it’s worth continuing to pay for Claude or not.
It’s great the fellows are paid so they are at least somewhat accountable vs volunteers who are often unreliable.
All that said, I bet 80% of what these fellows end up doing is automating fundraising emails…
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-kpmg
Suppose a fellow at say, Brave, is confronted with a graduate who tells them they can't get a job because no one hires juniors anymore - there is AI for that now. What is the fellow supposed to say then? "I can't help you either, but I can show you how you can build a kickass CV with Claude"?
I enjoyed Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle very much, so I've been slowly reading my way through his earlier works, and while his first novel is not as entertaining, it's surprisingly relevant today. There's Vonnegut's prescience about the impact of technology on society, of course, but even the description of a corporate retreat in the book, that he wrote with almost 75 years ago, hits too close to home.
This is pretty much opposite Google Summer of Code.
I really didn't know, but was curious, so I used an LLM to research it.
From what I've gathered,, one thing the higher education system is good at is using GenAI to automate personal labor :)
[1] https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/the-claude-boys
All non-profits need to do is demand model-agnostic deliverables, insist on handoff documentation, and budget for switching costs before the year ends.
But is it also a play on Philantropic?
alright
Yeah.
for reference, I've been using JetBrains All Products Pack and spent substantial amount in IDEs available under free non-commercial license, such as Rider and RustRover. if RustRover made things worse and I fell back to rustacean.vim, Rider and its ReSharper backend is fucking black magic and I swear I will outright refuse an employer who bans Rider and Visual Studio ReSharper extensions.
another theory: Adobe didn't hunt down pirates much because piracy bred new professionals whose companies would just have to pay for Creative Cloud.
Wouldn't surprise me. Microsoft had the same attitude for pirating Windows. Bill Gates said
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade
Adobe figured out how to collect once they went subscription only.
Anthropic can take their system cards and shove them up their ass in my opinion.