Mistral AI founder warns humanity faces its greatest AI threat

Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch has warned the global population of the biggest threats that artificial intelligence poses to humans. As global tech leaders continue to debate the impact of the technology on the job market, the Mistral AI boss says the biggest skill to humans might be “deskilling.”

In a recent interview, the Mistral AI boss dismissed claims that artificial intelligence will lead to more cuts to white-collar jobs. Another claim was made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who said that AI could be on its way to eliminating 50% of entry-level office jobs. Amodei mentioned that as producers of the technology, AI firms and labs need to be honest about what is coming. He added that unemployment could increase by 10% to 20% in the next five years.

Mistral AI CEO reveals AI’s threat to humans

Mensch dismissed the idea that artificial intelligence could run up the unemployment rate in the future. He said the bigger risk is that people might become lazier as they rely on the technology to search for information. The CEO, who co-founded the open-source large language model developer alongside Guillaume Sample and Timothy Lacroix in April 2023, mentioned that a way to avoid this is to ensure that humans remain actively involved in reviewing and critiquing artificial intelligence outputs.

He added that developers can avoid the risk if they look at it from a design aspect.

“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.

The Mistral AI CEO, who spoke at the Viva tech conference in Paris this month also added that it is important that humans do not see every output from artificial intelligence models as the truth.

The Mistral boss said that if people continue to be interested in learning, being able to process and criticize information is one of the most important components of learning. Mensch, who was a former Google DeepMind researcher also responded to a recent statement from Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger, who stated that AI is impacting entry-level engineering roles in the industry, even at AI firms. He added that Anthropic is focused on hiring experienced engineers, noting his hesitation with some entry-level workers.

Krieger mentioned that software engineers could see their jobs change in the next three years as coders are now outsourcing more of their work to humans. He added that humans will focus on “coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale — and that’s probably some combination of maybe a comeback of some static analysis or maybe AI-driven analysis tools of what was actually produced.”

Mensch also discussed Amodei’s assertion that AI could replace half of the entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years, noting that the Anthropic CEO liked to spread fear about AI as a marketing tactic. He said the assertion was an overstatement and he doesn’t see it happening in the next five years. Instead, Mensch said he thought AI could change white-collar jobs moving forward. “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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