‘Uncanny Valley’: Anthropic’s DOD Lawsuit, War Memes, and AI Coming for VC Jobs

Brian Barrett: The irony is my favorite, because I feel like venture capitalists have largely positioned themselves as immune to the effects of AI because they are very special and a machine can surely…

Zoe Schiffer: It’s art, not science.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s art, not science. Machines can handle all the jobs, but we can’t. The scale stops just below VC for them, in an entertaining and fun way. So I wonder how many people are using it now, especially because venture capitalists themselves are so skeptical of it, it seems. Who is the audience? Is this finding any real traction there?

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah. So the way ADIN works is they have scouts who look for potential deals, and those scouts can then make money on those deals. So I think it would be something where VCs wouldn’t necessarily adopt the network, but people would bypass them and they wouldn’t be as necessary, as useful. I think there was another great irony, which Arielle pointed out in her article, which is that if you can start a company with just yourself and a group of AI agents, you’re coding your way to success, do you even need all that venture capital money to get started?

Léa Feiger: I don’t know. There’s so much for me, there’s so much fear that AI will take jobs. I feel like every other article is saying, “And these people are nervous and these people are nervous.” Brian is right, the funny thing is that these are people who have gone all in on AI, but I’m still waiting. I’m still waiting for AI to take over. Has he ever done it? Will it still be?

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah. I think there is recent research. Yesterday I was talking to Will Knight, one of our fantastic AI reporters, about this, and he was saying, “Look, the evidence is just not there yet for very many sectors. The hype has, as is often the case, exceeded the actual data here. But I will say, being in San Francisco, I hear a lot of people say that the engineering teams in particular are very bloated right now. Agents can actually do a lot of the work and you certainly need humans to manage those agents, but you could cut a lot of teams by 80 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent. So I think we’re going to see more AI-related job losses, first in engineering and then in other sectors.

Brian Barrett: Marc Andreessen, famous venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, said exactly that in a recent podcast. Listen to how special he considers his own profession.

Marc Andreessen, audio archives: Every great venture capitalist of the last 70 years has missed out on most of the great companies of their generation. If it were a science, you could possibly have someone dial it in and get an 8 out of 10, but in the real world it’s not like that. It’s just that you’re in the luck business. And so there is an intangibility there. There is a taste aspect, a human relational aspect, a psychology side. And I don’t want to be definitive, but it’s possible that it’s literally timeless. And when AIs do everything else, this could be one of the last fields still occupied by people.