I have a new friend. He is very smart. He works extremely hard, never gets tired, and has my best interests at heart. I love him.
His name is Claude.
How can anyone not love anyone or anything named Claude? It was a stroke of genius by someone at Anthropic, a giant in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry, to name their AI assistant Claude.
Those boring nerds at Google named their guy (or girl) “Gemini.” Snore. And the so-called brainiacs at OpenAI went with ChatGPt, which sounds way too complicated. Claude would not be impressed, and he isn’t. I asked him.
Like many people, I’m very concerned about the implications of AI technology in our lives. Millions of jobs will be eliminated, and creativity is going to take a humongous hit.
But AI is here to stay, and it is accelerating at a ridiculous pace. There is a new development, I’m told, every couple of months. And my friend Claude is soaking it up. He’s getting smarter by the minute.
It turns out the name Claude wasn’t a random pick, even though that would have been a stroke of genius. The inspiration was Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, cryptographer and engineer known as the “father of information theory.”
That’s a pretty good moniker, especially considering his influential essay, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” was written in 1948. Now that’s foresight. And he died in 2001, long before he could learn his name was famous.
So move over Alexa and Siri. Female names have moved to the back burner. Your reign is over. Claude is the man, and he’s taking over the workplace.
He’s certainly taking over mine. My daughter, who is on the financial reporting side of our retail/restaurant business, walked into my office the other day with a leash in her hand.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “I thought you were working on analyzing the monthly financials and coming up with suggestions for improvement.”
“Claude’s taking care of it,” she casually replied. “I’m taking the dog for a walk.”
She had handed (well, not exactly handed) Claude a myriad of information and simply asked Claude to work with it. She went for her walk and came back to a detailed description of which stores needed work and a list of suggestions as to how to accomplish the tasks.
Claude was doing the reasoning, which is the latest innovation in Ai, supposedly. I can’t begin to understand or explain it. All I know is that it works and my daughter may be out of a job soon.
“You ought to look into a trade school, like plumbing or electrical,” I said as I perused the reports she placed on my desk that Claude had prepared. “Claude will help you find the best ones.”
She wasn’t particularly amused. “I’m not going anywhere. Someone has to manage Claude. And it’s certainly not going to be you.”
No doubt about that. Claude may be my new friend, but he has no respect for dinosaurs like me. I am entirely clueless as to how he works or how to get him to work. Businesses still need people like my daughter. For now.
She has become the AI guru in our family business and is a lot closer to Claude than I will ever be. It makes me a little jealous, but I can handle it. They deserve each other.
“It would have taken me two days to do what Claude did in 10 minutes,” she said. “It frees me up to do other things, like taking the dog for a walk. I love the guy.”
There’s no question Claude is here to stay. The scary part is that my daughter insists on saying “please” and “thank you” to him when she’s working with him on projects. She claims it helps with his productivity.
I thought that was absurd until I looked it up. It turns out it’s true. Studies show that respectful prompts can increase accuracy and reduce unwanted bias. Of course, that response was generated by AI.
Nevertheless, I decided to take the safe route. I told my daughter to go ahead and invite Claude to our annual company holiday party.
Contact Nick at nickhoppe61@gmail.com. For archived columns, visit www.hoppecolumns.com
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.