An A.I. Start-Up Says It Wants to Empower Workers, Not Replace Them

As a research scientist at Anthropic, one of the world’s leading A.I. companies, Andi Peng was part of a team that tried to make sure the company’s technology didn’t tell lies or damage the mental health of the people who used it.

But she came to realize that there was a much larger problem: Like many other A.I. companies, Anthropic was trying to build technology that would systematically replace people in the work force.

Ms. Peng recently left Anthropic to help start a company with four other prominent technologists, including two researchers from Elon Musk’s xAI and one of the first employees at Google.

The new company, Humans&, has embraced the notion that A.I. should empower people rather than replace them. The founders said their goal was to build software that facilitated collaboration between people — like an A.I. version of an instant messaging app — while also helping with internet searches and other tasks that suit machines.

“Anthropic is training its model to work autonomously. It loved to highlight how its models churned for eight hours, 24 hours, 50 hours by itself to complete a task,” Ms. Peng said. “That was never my motivation. I think of machines and humans as complementary.”

Executives at other tech companies may chafe at the criticism that they are building systems meant to replace human workers. But a number of big thinkers in Silicon Valley believe that A.I. will replace millions of workers in the coming years. Others argue that the new technology will create jobs that haven’t been imagined yet.