> CodePath, an Anthropic nonprofit partner and America’s largest provider of collegiate computer science education, will act as the fellows’ official employer of record and lead programming during the fellowship.
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 seems like one way to saddle nonprofits with functional, but potentially very expensive systems, set up by someone who helps them for a year then disappears and leaves them with no expertise to do long-term cost control or functionality improvements.
I had to read this twice to understand what they're actually proposing here. The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. The blog seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.
-- 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)
This is what always confuses me about the “keep up or get left behind” crowd. Either these tools are gods in boxes and we’re all going to be replaced or they are actually something that you can gain expertise around. If you can gain expertise around them then sure there’s value in keeping up. But those shouting we’ve all gotta keep up are mostly the same claiming they are building god boxes. It genuinely has to be one or the other. Something isn’t a god box if you have to learn how to best use it.
Seems like there is skill in knowing what to ask the genie for, no matter how powerful the genie is? How is that not going to be an issue?
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.
> The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. This seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.
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).
I believe this is an attempt to try out a possible answer to the problem of "If AI makes it non-viable for individual companies to pay junior devs, there will be no junior devs". The posited theory: Maybe the AI companies pay them off what is effectively a tax on the industry as a whole (that they can extract because every company has no choice but to pay their fees). It's pretty dystopian so I hope this isn't the future, but... maybe worth trying as an experiment?
I think I summarized it best: AI companies are taking money out of the developer salary pool and giving it to themselves. I personally don't mind since I don't have to work at a company to make money, but I do feel for people who do.
> 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)
Hey, think critically about where you are on the internet. You're on a message board run by YCombinator, who's stated goal is to teach people to run startups. Startups are inherently disruptive. When one business disrupts another, people lose their jobs.
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!)
---
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.
I see your point, but in this case we are not talking about disruption at the scale of a product category, vertical, or even an entire industry. AI companies are trying to disrupt entire sectors of the economy at the same time: knowledge work/white collar jobs, creative work (design, photo, video, ...), medical professions, etc.
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.
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…
I'm negative on this proposal because it sounds like Anthropic put the cart before the horse. Today, at this very moment, 9 out of 10 non-profits and NGOs run of IT infrastructure wholly dependent on email servers, office software, and phone calls. For Anthropic to create a positive result from flooding the space with cut-rate FDEs, NGOS would need to have in-place the sort of infrastructure that could accommodate whatever widgets Sonnet generate, not to mention the right personnel to manage that infrastructure long-term. If an NGO's IT Department is already positioned properly to embrace a Claude Corps Missionary, they near-certainly wouldn't need a Claude Corps Missionary because they would need to publicly justify that department's existence year-after-year. So what does this actually look like for the chosen organizations, other than a sales pitch.
I guess this is no different than Google Summer of Code, Code for America, etc but with AI. If it actually helps these orgs and doesn't lock them into Anthropic pricing/models then sure, let it rip.
This is an avenue I think will eventually be tried as a monetisation path: Models that are fully unavailable to company outsiders, you can just hire consultants that will be thin layers to the model. That way the costs that will come are more palatable since you pay for a hired person rather than a product/service.
Well played, Anthropic.
- Nvidia gives AI labs money to run their models.
- AI labs give money to AI engineers to use the models.
- Companies are getting hooked on AI products.
- AI engineers are getting hooked on AI products.
- Regular Software Engineers are getting devalued/replaced by low-skill AI engineers.
- Their employers get more money to spend on AI.
Neat throwback to Google Summer of Code, when tech felt so much simpler (at least to me). Anyone know anything about CodePath, Social Finance, or the nonprofits listed?
Claude Corps, Forward Deployed Engineers, Strategic Token Reserves… what’s with all these military inspired naming conventions in AI? We’re just typing softly on keyboards…
"Staging" is not and has never been a military analogy. All kinds of workers have staging areas. Brick layers stage their work before laying. Builders stage materials. Staging is an area where you place your work before you begin deploying it.
Which itself is named after a military term, and has been described in the terms of a military campaign, just for peace. Wikipedia begins the history of the Peace Corps with an article titled "A Proposal for a Total Peace Offensive". Followed later by 'In 1952 Senator Brien McMahon (D-Connecticut) proposed an "army" of young Americans to act as "missionaries of democracy"'
Good lord, what the fuck is wrong with these companies if they think this is a good thing? They are completely divorced from public opinion that rightfully hates them.
this is obviously a way to try and get someone hooked, younger people and nonprofits alike. much like their Claude for Open-Source program, which gives a one-time 6-month Claude Max credit for maintainers of some super-popular open-source projects.
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.
> 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.
> CodePath, an Anthropic nonprofit partner and America’s largest provider of collegiate computer science education, will act as the fellows’ official employer of record and lead programming during the fellowship.
So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits.... but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
That’s how it sounds
Why everything they do sounds shady?
I'm not saying it's shady.
> 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.
Probably because it is shady?
The contractor game has been played in Silicon Valley since basically there's been a valley.
This seems like one way to saddle nonprofits with functional, but potentially very expensive systems, set up by someone who helps them for a year then disappears and leaves them with no expertise to do long-term cost control or functionality improvements.
They've already done this through the 6m Anthropic API "unlimited plan" grants. Claude-only is getting embedded.
They know it's a temporary job going in, though. How is this different than having an intern?
If they're not using this opportunity to train other staff then that seems like a management problem.
It certainly is a management problem, as non-profits are certainly not well known for having strong management.
Having had to fix the messes of several green-washing consultants from PWC, JP Morgan Chase etc. I can confirm that this is absolutely guaranteed.
I had to read this twice to understand what they're actually proposing here. The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. The blog seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.
-- 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)
This is what always confuses me about the “keep up or get left behind” crowd. Either these tools are gods in boxes and we’re all going to be replaced or they are actually something that you can gain expertise around. If you can gain expertise around them then sure there’s value in keeping up. But those shouting we’ve all gotta keep up are mostly the same claiming they are building god boxes. It genuinely has to be one or the other. Something isn’t a god box if you have to learn how to best use it.
Seems like there is skill in knowing what to ask the genie for, no matter how powerful the genie is? How is that not going to be an issue?
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.
> The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. This seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.
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).
I believe this is an attempt to try out a possible answer to the problem of "If AI makes it non-viable for individual companies to pay junior devs, there will be no junior devs". The posited theory: Maybe the AI companies pay them off what is effectively a tax on the industry as a whole (that they can extract because every company has no choice but to pay their fees). It's pretty dystopian so I hope this isn't the future, but... maybe worth trying as an experiment?
I think I summarized it best: AI companies are taking money out of the developer salary pool and giving it to themselves. I personally don't mind since I don't have to work at a company to make money, but I do feel for people who do.
I did not have AI missionaries on my bingo card this year.
Taken verbatim from Anthropic’s Economic Policy Framework (https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential/epf):
> 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)
Hey, think critically about where you are on the internet. You're on a message board run by YCombinator, who's stated goal is to teach people to run startups. Startups are inherently disruptive. When one business disrupts another, people lose their jobs.
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!)
---
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.
I see your point, but in this case we are not talking about disruption at the scale of a product category, vertical, or even an entire industry. AI companies are trying to disrupt entire sectors of the economy at the same time: knowledge work/white collar jobs, creative work (design, photo, video, ...), medical professions, etc.
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.
Surprised how negative most of the comments are.
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…
I'm negative on this proposal because it sounds like Anthropic put the cart before the horse. Today, at this very moment, 9 out of 10 non-profits and NGOs run of IT infrastructure wholly dependent on email servers, office software, and phone calls. For Anthropic to create a positive result from flooding the space with cut-rate FDEs, NGOS would need to have in-place the sort of infrastructure that could accommodate whatever widgets Sonnet generate, not to mention the right personnel to manage that infrastructure long-term. If an NGO's IT Department is already positioned properly to embrace a Claude Corps Missionary, they near-certainly wouldn't need a Claude Corps Missionary because they would need to publicly justify that department's existence year-after-year. So what does this actually look like for the chosen organizations, other than a sales pitch.
I guess this is no different than Google Summer of Code, Code for America, etc but with AI. If it actually helps these orgs and doesn't lock them into Anthropic pricing/models then sure, let it rip.
This is vastly different than SoC. This is an in-person full time year evangelizing Anthropics business.
How does this not lock them into Anthropic? You think these folks are going to help set up Copilot?
This is an avenue I think will eventually be tried as a monetisation path: Models that are fully unavailable to company outsiders, you can just hire consultants that will be thin layers to the model. That way the costs that will come are more palatable since you pay for a hired person rather than a product/service.
They already have a consulting partnership with KPMG as part of a Strategic Alliance
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-kpmg
What are the odds these nonprofits were chosen due to proximity to communities with contentious datacenter buildouts?
Well played, Anthropic. - Nvidia gives AI labs money to run their models. - AI labs give money to AI engineers to use the models. - Companies are getting hooked on AI products. - AI engineers are getting hooked on AI products. - Regular Software Engineers are getting devalued/replaced by low-skill AI engineers. - Their employers get more money to spend on AI.
This lands with religious undertones for me, as it sounds like a missionary deployment program, albeit with a paid salary.
Neat throwback to Google Summer of Code, when tech felt so much simpler (at least to me). Anyone know anything about CodePath, Social Finance, or the nonprofits listed?
Sounds like a nice, charitable thing. Of course it benefits the business too, nothing is free, duh. But it's still good. Cheers.
Claude Corps, Forward Deployed Engineers, Strategic Token Reserves… what’s with all these military inspired naming conventions in AI? We’re just typing softly on keyboards…
Time to deploy to the staging environment after discussing it in the war room.
"Staging" is not and has never been a military analogy. All kinds of workers have staging areas. Brick layers stage their work before laying. Builders stage materials. Staging is an area where you place your work before you begin deploying it.
It goes hard in today's environment ig
Reminds me more of Peace Corps.
Which itself is named after a military term, and has been described in the terms of a military campaign, just for peace. Wikipedia begins the history of the Peace Corps with an article titled "A Proposal for a Total Peace Offensive". Followed later by 'In 1952 Senator Brien McMahon (D-Connecticut) proposed an "army" of young Americans to act as "missionaries of democracy"'
A trained AI operator will neutralise threats to your production.
Palantir had first mover advantage on FDE rebranding of sales engineer, and so its the term that stuck
lmfao
Not sure how necessary is this.
From what I've gathered,, one thing the higher education system is good at is using GenAI to automate personal labor :)
They should name their next model Algernon.
Is that a Fable ?
No it’s a myth
so cheap FDE's for the non profit sector
alright
Good lord, what the fuck is wrong with these companies if they think this is a good thing? They are completely divorced from public opinion that rightfully hates them.
this is obviously a way to try and get someone hooked, younger people and nonprofits alike. much like their Claude for Open-Source program, which gives a one-time 6-month Claude Max credit for maintainers of some super-popular open-source projects.
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.
> 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.
If that makes you angry, you should read: https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential. They are literally telling users what they need to do.
Anthropic can take their system cards and shove them up their ass in my opinion.
Are the Techbros drunk with power again?
Yeah.