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The president of one of Silicon Valley’s most-watched AI ventures says tools powered by the technology will inevitably become a “force multiplier” for businesses and spark the kind of productivity gains that turbo-charged the U.S. economy in the 1980s and ’90s.
Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, also strongly emphasized in her session Wednesday at Canva Create the need for ethical and security guardrails to be built into the tools and applications that will be fueled by the generative AI tech being hatched by Anthropic and other firms. There’s a strong focus at Anthropic on ensuring that AI tools are made available throughout the world to help ensure that the benefits spread beyond North America and Europe.
“We’re thinking very critically about how access to this technology is really available to people reagardless of where they are in the world,” Amodei said during her Q&A with Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins. “Without active efforts we worry that AI will be concentrated in the particular places that all technological breakthroughs have been.”
The Canva Create: Uncharted event brought together several thousand superfans of the fast-growing design platform to SoFi Stadium for a day of panels and keynotes, product demos and general schmoozing in the stadium’s spacious plaza areas. The growth of AI as a force in tech, business and culture was a key focus of the event. AI-powered tech has been central to Canva since it was founded in 2013 by Perkins, Cliff Obrecht (who is chief operating officer) and Cameron Adams (chief product officer).
Amodei and Perkins spoke about use cases for AI tools, ranging from personal tasks to helping the largest firms manage some of their most labor-intensive tasks. Anthropic’s most prominent product is the AI agent Claude. Amodei stressed that the potential is vast for an AI agent such as Claude that has the chance to get to know a user’s quirks and ticks over a years-long period.
“These models have this ability to ingest a huge amount of context and information,” Amodei said. “You could have this personalized tutor for life. This partner knows and understands you and has seen you grow potentially from a young age.”
From personal experience, Amodei offered that Claude “was really helpful in potty training my toddler.”
The user base for Claude is “growing like crazy,” Amodei added. San Francisco-based Anthropic has grown as quickly as a toddler, climbing from 300 employees to 1,000 in the past year.
Anthropic does much of its work with business clients who have super-specific needs to tackle through AI innovations. As such, Anthropic has been highly attuned to finding ways to bake-in security, legal and ethical parameters to their models, to help businesses avoid problems down the road. Anthropic worked closely with Canva on a new offering — Canva Code — that the design platform unveiled to users as part of the Canva Create event. Canva Code employs the simple interface of Canva to allow users to easily write code to build websites and other digital products.
“We spend a lot of time with customers talking about what are the features that will make AI more powerful and transformative in your business,” Amodei said.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 as a public benefit corporation. It was “founded on this belief that you can develop transformative AI technologies in way that is good and safe and beneficial for everyone,” Amodei said.
Canva is the perfect platform for tools that tap into “the powerful unlock that comes from being able to develop something yourself,” Amodei said. Perkins added that the product design and visualization features now made possible by AI have “completely changed the way we do product development at Canva.
Amodei, like others in her field, stressed that the intergration of AI into daily life in the coming years should be a boon to humanity, not a menace or a job-destroying machine.
For businesses, “the majority of AI use cases are augmentative,” Amodei said. “AI is helping humans to augment things they are already doing — with creative work in particular. AI is this incredible force multiplier that helps you to think ‘What are the things I really want to develop and build?’ “
