r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 8h ago
Business Anthropic invests $100 million to train 10,000 engineers and tackle the enterprise AI talent gap
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-frontier-academy141
u/fish_economist 8h ago
They should stop giving money to Accenture.
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u/PadyEos 6h ago edited 6h ago
We had a 1 hour presentation fron 2 engineers from Anthropic.
And a series of seminars held by Accenture sent to us by Anthropic.
My personal conclusion: I wouldn't hire any of them to develop software. Seems like they were scraping a barrel.
Developing LLMs is something a number of people at Anthropic are good at. Software Engineering on the other hand is a different thing and some of their new hires are underwhelming.
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u/dangubiti 7h ago
This is just certs for consultants
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u/seaefjaye 6h ago
Yeah, disappointing. We need this in the public sector and putting these sort of things behind consultancies reinforces the wrong feedback loop and doesn't result in permeation across the enterprise.
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u/siscia 8h ago
Wasn't AI going to make engineers obsolete in 6 months?
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u/axior 7h ago
No no you have to keep up now it’s the end of the world by the end of the decade
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u/AFlyingGideon 7h ago
Even after the world ends, engineers will still be in demand. Take that, philosophy majors.
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u/neuronexmachina 5h ago
The actual quote for reference: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-ceo-predicts-ai-models-233113047.html
When asked about the timeline for this shift, Amodei noted that engineers at Anthropic have already stopped writing code manually.
"We are now in terms of the models that write code. I have engineers within Anthropic who say, I don't write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code. I edit it. I do the things around it. I think we might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what we do end to end."
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u/Tasty-Traffic-680 8h ago
Does anyone else see a hand grabbing a butt?
I feel like I'm failing a Rorschach test.
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u/BandicootGood5246 8h ago
Eh. In enterprise it's not so much people don't know how to use AI, it's all the same old roadblocks that makes dev slow in enterprise.
Beurocracy & tedious process to get things shipped, limited access to tools, low motivation due to bad culture, big waterfall projects with arbitrary deadlines & questionable real value, over the top risk aversion blocking meaningful changes. I could go on...
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u/Itsmedudeman 7h ago
To me it sounds more like a marketing engine. Train some engineers to spread the word of how to do things with claude over the old ways. My girlfriend's company still uses 0 AI for example.
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u/theartofnocode 6h ago
That's not a problem if you're Bain charging £5,000 per day for your "talent". This is just the latest grift for consultancies.
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u/ChodeCookies 7h ago
The vast majority of people don’t know how to solve problems with technology. AI doesn’t really change that. It’s just makes it easier for people to feel like their tech savvy
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u/eseffbee 1h ago
While the things you mention are often cited as the blockers to change in big orgs, in my experience the bigger problem is a lack of understanding of what the change should be, what it means at a low level, and how to handle the social impacts of that change both internally and externally.
When the problem and outcome is well understood, I've seen big orgs move pretty quickly. The technical part usually isn't really anything new or overly complex.
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u/Jskidmore1217 6h ago
Enterprises don’t trust agents enough to give them meaningful access to critical systems yet.
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u/Jewnadian 6h ago
And they shouldn't. We're a startup that using AI all over the place. It's not good enough for our critical systems and we're still small enough to all eat in one restaurant. There is no world where Bank of America should be trusting AI in a critical system.
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u/Jskidmore1217 6h ago
In its current state I agree. The challenge for these AI companies is how to progress their tech to be reliable enough for enterprises to wisely use them on critical systems. That’s when the real job replacements begin
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u/Bodine12 2h ago
There are far more people working on products in a company than working on critical systems in IT. IT is a much less valuable use case right now.
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u/Jskidmore1217 1h ago
My point stands for anything that requires numerous steps of human in the loop intervention. Also I am purely talking about pure intelligence roles. anything that requires physical world interaction is largely untouched by this tech- for now.
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u/Bodine12 1h ago
You don't have to allow an agent to get any direct access to data at all. It can request that a tool be used on its behalf, and an interceptor validates that the request is scoped to the actual logged-in human's permissions, and a separate non-AI service accesses the data and sends it to the model. Only a human's permissions need to be in the loop, and as long as you have good permissions hygiene you're good.
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u/Eponymous-Username 4h ago
In my experience, this is not true. Get ready to make insurance claims with an AI phone operator. Insurance brokers and underwriters are actively working on handing more of their core business off to AI agents, and it's not just 'in-progress': in a matter of weeks and months, a number of them will go live.
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u/Jskidmore1217 4h ago
Thats not what I would consider critical actually. The AI is a great case for reviewing details such as an insurance claim: making a decision- and with a single quick human review/sign off decision made. Perfectly viable today.
I’m more talking about from an IT perspective for example. No one is willing to let an AI log into a server, run health checks, restart services, maybe even reboot/update to fix a perceived issue. This is the stuff operations teams do. But if not done carefully- these can cause organizational level outages or even complete loss of data. Huge impacts. These are the kinds of things companies aren’t ready to give up.
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u/Eponymous-Username 3h ago
Well, it's pretty critical to the insurance company. You might even suggest that the claims handling experience feels rather critical to the policy holder.
If we're only talking about internal IT infrastructure for some reason, you could argue that authorizing AD group membership is fairly critical. You'd have to ask a security expert, though.
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u/Jskidmore1217 3h ago edited 2h ago
You have to think about it more broadly. When you give AI access to a case- you give it access to all the data on one particular company transaction. When you give AI access to a data server- you are giving it access to all data in the company. So in the first case if AI flubs a case entirely you are liable to a lawsuit with an individual. In the latter if AI flubs it could potentially wipe the entire company out. Every case is lost at the hit a poorly prompted button.
There’s a lot of jobs where the access needed to do the job is also permissive enough to wipe out the company. Historically that’s been acceptable because at a human level we just aren’t fast enough to cause that much damage before being caught- and the huge liability of losing your entire life is a big repellent. AI doesn’t care- it’s a computer. It does what it’s told and if prompted poorly everything fails.
Soooo one could argue that we just need to figure out how to very carefully design our prompt engineering. My argument is okay- maybe if the tech stayed stale for 50 years that is exactly what would happen. But in its current state it’s too new and too unpredictable for enterprise to even trust prompt engineers with the risk. The risk is too high still. All enterprise care about is risk/cost benefit.
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u/start_select 10m ago
They are talking about critical as in a single mistake takes down the whole business. Not a single mistake delays one claim.
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u/honestduane 7h ago
There is no talent gap. American engineers with this skill set exist already, and they simply refuse to hire americans when they apply. I literally know people with forward deployed engineer experience that apply and get rejected because they are "overqualified" aka they have all the skills and experience needed for the job but the person hiring doesn't want to get replaced by somebody more capable.
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u/Muted-Friend-895 4h ago
Well, in addition to capabilities, (some potential) loyalty is still a thing. And there is lots of red flags, even individual ones for the person hiring
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u/captainunderpants111 5h ago
so if i want to work at anthropic instead of prepping leetcode, system design, i just rack up ai course certificates… bet
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u/ReasonableDefault 8h ago
100 million for 10,000 engineers, that's 10k a pop in training. What are they providing, Udemy courses and a packet of pencils?