Mistral AI CEO and former Google DeepMind researcher Arthur Mensch recently said that the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on white-collared jobs is an “overstatement”. In an interview with The Times of London at the VivaTech conference in Paris, Mensch dismissed the idea that AI will result in huge job cuts. Instead, he sees AI “deskilling” people as one of the biggest threats to the job market. Mensch said that as people rely more on AI to search and summarize information, they may stop thinking critically themselves. “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,” Mensch said at the Paris conference earlier this month. “You want people to continue learning,” he continued. “Being able to synthesize information and criticize information is a core component to learning.”
Mistral AI CEO responds to Anthropic CEO’s remark on losing over half of entry-level jobs to AI
During the interview, Mensch also responded to recent warnings of losing jobs to AI including the one by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Dario said that AI may replace half of entry-level white-collar workers in the next five years. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei told Axios in an interview published last month. The 42-year-old CEO emphasized that most people remain unaware of the impending transformation, calling it a reality that “sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”Mensch said “I think it’s very much of an overstatement,” adding that he believed Amodei liked to “spread fear” as a marketing strategy. Instead of job cuts, Mensch believes AI will reshape office work, with more emphasis on human interaction. “I do expect that we’ll have more relational tasks because that’s not something you can easily replace,” he said.