• A former Anthropic employee wrote a Substack post about his 8-month stint at the then-new AI lab.
• It offers a rare look at Anthropic's early, safety-obsessed culture that the author said left him burned out.
• He describes a visit from the FBI and fresh croissants in an ugly office.

Anthropic's executives raced to build a safe AI — and one former employee said that pursuit left him feeling burned out and disillusioned.

In a lengthy Substack post, Ivan Vendrov, who worked as a member of the AI lab's technical staff from late 2022 to mid-2023, described an intense workplace, where fears of AI catastrophe clashed with the urge to build safe AGI for commercial use.

Vendrov began the post by saying his account should not be taken as gospel. He said he recalled the events "from memory," wrote the "gist of the dialogue rather than the exact words used," and that the post is "merely the experience of one guy in a junior role during a short window of time."

Still, it's a remarkable look into the early days of one of the world's preeminent AI companies, with a named employee explaining how the company's formative period created a highly particular workplace.

It also comes days after Anthropic filed to go public. Anthropic declined to comment on this story.

Equity, the FBI, and a sushi dinner

Vendrov, whose LinkedIn says he now works at Midjourney, wrote that he was weighing contract offers from OpenAI and Anthropic in 2022.

He says he decided to join Anthropic after lunch with one of the AI company's cofounders, who said they were already chatting with regulators in Washington.

A recruiter asked whether he wanted to pledge two-thirds of his equity to charity.

"All the co-founders have made the pledge," Vendrov recalled the recruiter saying. He wrote that he was unsure whether the job offer was contingent on his agreement, so he said yes.

Anthropic's S-1 filing describes an employee donation-matching program, where workers can pledge a "meaningful portion" of their equity awards. The company reported that 50% of its employees are included in the program.

Vendrov described a cramped, ugly office. He said it was stocked with fresh croissants and, later, a popular masseuse came twice a week. He said he was never able to schedule a massage because it was always fully booked.

There was a visit from the FBI once, he wrote. The agent warned that Anthropic was "probably already the target of multiple foreign intelligence agencies."

Anthropic also hosted a sushi chef in the office, Vendrov wrote — but the luxe experience was met with resistance. The following day, he said a cofounder wrote in the company Slack that it set the wrong tone.

"We're not here to get rich and eat caviar," they said, per Vendrov's memory, before pitching future dinners of rice and beans.

The burnout

Vendrov's post detailed sleepless nights, walks with other stressed-out colleagues, and moments where he felt he couldn't be honest about his emotions with colleagues.

Eight months after signing his contract offer, Vendrov said he wrote a resignation letter. As he drafted the letter, he said he thought about describing his doubts to the company, but worried it would create doubt in colleagues who were "smarter than me, more competent than me, more solidly well-intentioned than me."

Instead, he said he praised Anthropic as an "unbelievably good organization."

Vendrov did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Um estudo interno divulgado pela Anthropic revelou que os agentes de inteligência artificial da empresa já trabalham seis horas para cada hora de um funcionário humano. O resultado direto desse avanço é queda no número de contratações.

Os agentes são ferramentas capazes de pensar e tomar decisões de forma autônoma, com pouquíssima interferência humana.

O especialista em IA e colunista da CNN Brasil Álvaro Machado Dias explicou que, nesse novo cenário, o papel do trabalhador humano se aproxima cada vez mais da gestão. “Ele faz o trabalho que era do chefe dele”, afirmou Machado.

Segundo ele, as principais funções humanas passam a ser escrever planos para que a IA execute tarefas, checar os resultados produzidos e avaliar se é possível avançar para a próxima etapa ou se são necessários ajustes no caminho.

Mudança no perfil das contratações

As empresas estão contratando menos, mas buscam profissionais com expertise técnica capaz de ser aplicada diretamente em fluxos de inteligência artificial.

“Há uma mudança no perfil das contratações e isso está mexendo com todos os departamentos”, destacou Machado.

Para ele, departamentos inteiros, como o de marketing, já não existem da mesma forma que há dois anos. Nesse contexto, profissionais iniciantes perdem espaço, pois as empresas passam a priorizar quem já chega com habilidades técnicas prontas para serem aplicadas.

Machado apontou ainda que a queda de 9% nas contratações observada no setor de tecnologia tende a se expandir para o mercado como um todo, especialmente nas economias mais avançadas.

“Mas uma hora, com certeza, chega aqui”, alertou, referindo-se ao Brasil. No país, 50% das empresas já utilizam inteligência artificial, e a perspectiva é de crescimento acelerado.

IA avança além do setor de tecnologia

Segundo o especialista, a adoção de agentes de IA em setores fora da tecnologia pode ser ainda mais fácil de implementar do que nas próprias empresas desenvolvedoras. Isso porque, quanto mais tarefas repetitivas um setor possui, maior é o potencial de automação.

Ele citou exemplos práticos: em bancos, agentes podem realizar análises de crédito verificando documentos automaticamente; em escritórios de contabilidade, podem preencher declarações de imposto de renda; e em lojas, podem atender clientes via WhatsApp e checar o inventário simultaneamente.

O ser humano como gargalo

Um dos pontos mais relevantes do debate, que aconteceu durante o Prime Time, da CNN Brasil, foi a confiança nas máquinas.

Se antes a desconfiança vinha dos erros frequentes da IA, agora o risco surge do excesso de confiança. “A desconfiança emerge porque as pessoas estão simplesmente mandando trabalho para o mundo sem checar”, afirmou Machado.

Ele destacou que a frase que circula no Vale do Silício atualmente é que “o ser humano se tornou o novo gargalo”, já que a IA gera análises, relatórios e insights em volume e velocidade que superam a capacidade humana de revisão.

Quanto ao perfil ideal do profissional nesse novo ambiente, o especialista descreveu alguém com muita velocidade e capacidade de execução, mas que não seja excessivamente detalhista. “A tendência atual é as coisas saírem com menos checagem e maior volume”, disse.

Para ele, isso implica mais incerteza e mais risco, mas, no agregado, a produtividade é multiplicada de forma significativa.

49% dos brasileiros acham que IA melhora desempenho no trabalho

• Mathematicians need to develop their oft-neglected social skills, a math professor at Cornell said.
• Though AI can do the legwork on complex problems, personal charisma is a human-only skill, Steven Strogatz said.
• "Rizz is more and more in demand," he added.

"Social skills" and "mathematics" are terms not often grouped together. In the age of AI, one math scholar says that needs to change.

With AI now capable of handling the geeky legwork required by complex problems, Steven Strogatz, a lecturer and Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor at Cornell University, said mathematicians should prioritize developing their personal charm in order to set themselves apart.

"I'm starting to think that what makes a future mathematician or a math professor is your unique brand," Strogatz said in an interview with Grant Sanderson, a math educator affiliated with Stanford University.

"Rizz is in more and more demand because it's something that only people have," he added.

Rizz, a Gen Z slang term, is defined by Merriam-Webster as "romantic appeal or charm." (Strogatz, who is 67, appeared to use the term solely to mean charm or charisma. He did not suggest mathematicians need to work on their romantic prowess.)

"What we're selecting for is an element of mathematical rizz," said Sanderson. "The PhDs to be are not going to be differentiated by pure problem-solving abilities."

The brusque push of AI companies into mathematics has caused consternation and head-scratching from many a math geek, as the field ponders ways to stay relevant while OpenAI floods the zone with hundreds of proposed solutions to the world's most complex problems.

Some professors have sworn off AI altogether. Most, however, are trying to find ways to incorporate the technology into their work.

In September, a group of undergraduates at Caltech announced a "mathathon" event in which participants were encouraged to use AI to solve problems in a single, no-sleep sprint. Only days after the undergrads announced the event, a coalition of over 700 academics signed an open letter calling for its cancellation, citing its promotion of AI "slop."

Though the event is set to continue, with some slight alterations, the clash underscored an internal conflict in the math community over how to adapt to AI — a development poised to impact many burgeoning careers in the field.

"We've had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday," Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU, said after OpenAI published 700 new findings about outstanding problems earlier this month.

The issue is of supreme importance to Strogatz, who has made several media appearances in the last couple of months. In an essay published in The Atlantic on Sunday, he put the issue in stark terms.

"I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026," he wrote. "Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway."

La Tierra se mueve de tres maneras: sobre sí misma, con la rotación; alrededor del Sol, con la traslación; y oscilando como una peonza, en un lentísimo movimiento que tarda en completarse unos 26.000 años y que se conoce como precesión. Debido a su existencia, el cielo de hoy es distinto al que vieron otros hombres y mujeres a lo largo de la historia. Con el esoterismo europeo de la primera mitad del siglo XX se popularizó la idea de que las eras astrológicas marcaban el signo de los tiempos, según donde estuviera el Sol en el primer día de primavera: la Antigua Grecia y la República romana coincidieron con la era de Aries, el cristianismo con la de Piscis y pronto llegará la de Acuario, si no lo ha hecho ya. La New Age se subió al carro, y Raphael se desató cantando aquello de Aquarius. Los 2.000 años de duración de cada era son flexibles: Carl Jung, por ejemplo, situaba el inicio de Acuario entre 2000 y 2200. La astrología tradicional, que prefiere medir los cambios de época con las conjunciones de los señores del tiempo, Júpiter y Saturno, que se unen ópticamente en el cielo cada 20 años, dice que el momento importante fue el 21 de diciembre de 2020, cuando se produjo la primera “gran conjunción” en Acuario desde la Edad Media. Las redes pensaron que, esta vez sí, iba a comenzar el nuevo tiempo, pero muy alejado de la paz y el amor que profetizó la interpretación hippie. Simbólicamente, Acuario es la ciencia y la tecnología, el progreso, la inteligencia, la comunidad y la revolución, pero todo ello de una forma desapegada y etérea, incluso implacable, porque es un signo de aire. El wifi de casa, por ejemplo, sería muy Acuario.

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