Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…The growing debate about AI’s impact on productivity; Anthropic debuts the first hybrid reasoning model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet; AI models are prone to cheating their way to goals and that should worry us; a new U.K. report highlights the need for AI regulation.
In the U.S., Elon Musk and his minions at the newly created Department of Government Efficiency have been using AI to attempt to identify budget cuts across the federal government. Some of these cuts—such as slashing anything having to do with diversity or that touched on climate change—seem more driven by ideology than any actual drive for efficiency. Musk and his deputies have summarily dismissed thousands of federal workers and are threatening to fire thousands more, with AI being used again to help decide who to cull. And it seems that one reason Musk and his team think so many of these jobs can be eliminated without derailing vital government services is a belief that in many cases AI can take on the tasks these workers once performed.
But Musk’s faith in AI’s current abilities is not matched so far by evidence from the private sector, where there is a growing debate about exactly how much of a productivity boost AI is providing.
