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.
This is their way of justification and assuagement.
It is a noble sentiment, but also a token gesture.
> 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)
For example?
Most of the products they build seem to be tools rather than replacements.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
But is it also a play on Philantropic?
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 :)
All non-profits need to do is demand model-agnostic deliverables, insist on handoff documentation, and budget for switching costs before the year ends.
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.