"Returns on intuition": Why Anthropic no longer needs junior engineers and warns of an economic shock.

"We're hiring more people with lots and lots of experience than we did before, because the returns on intuition are much greater than before," Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said in an interview with Reason. In the past, experienced researchers needed large teams to run experiments. Now Claude handles that scaling. The result: companies are specifically looking for "senior intuition" and skipping entry-level hires.

Clark says this trend will hit the broader economy hard. When AI multiplies the output of top experts but automates entry-level work at the same time, a dangerous paradox emerges. "I sort of expect that AI might yield more extreme scenarios than ones we've had in the past. Like, it might yield far above-trend GDP growth, and that GDP growth might be accompanied by a spike in unemployment that you typically only see during a recession." No government is ready for that, he says.