Who’s most optimistic about AI — and who isn’t
Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images
People in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are more optimistic about artificial intelligence than those in Western Europe and North America, according to a report by Anthropic that surveyed around 81,000 people in 159 countries.
The study, published Wednesday, revealed how economic gains from AI usage formed the main aspiration for most respondents, but analysts also warned that not everyone stands to benefit equally.
Anthropic researchers invited users of its Claude large language model to participate in conversations centered around questions about usage habits, hopes and fears over the development of AI.
These conversations, held using Anthropic Interviewer — a variant of Claude trained to conduct interviews — were subsequently also analyzed with Claude. First to filter out “spammy, unserious, or extremely minimal” responses, then for classifying and tagging responses by sentiment.
Prospects of economic gains
Respondents reported having both the highest hopes for AI — and seeing its greatest benefits — in their workplaces.
According to the report, 18.8% of respondents sought “professional excellence” from their use of AI. Similarly, 32% reported that AI was most useful for boosting productivity.
Most productivity gains, according to Anthropic, involved respondents outsourcing more mundane tasks to be able to “focus on strategic, higher-level problems.” Others said AI helped to free them up for pursuits beyond work.
Some analysts were unsurprised by these sentiments, as they said the present stage of AI development suited more menial applications.
“At the moment, AI is best suited to highly repetitive, narrowly focused, goal-oriented use cases … similar to specific tasks on an assembly line,” Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia wrote in an email to CNBC.
More specifically, these applications often include administrative tasks like “HR, billing, and other backoffice functions,” according to Seema Shah, vice president of insights from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower in an email to CNBC.
The financial spoils of AI also seemed to favor an entrepreneurial class, as independent workers — which includes entrepreneurs, small business owners, and those with side gigs — experienced more than triple the rates of economic empowerment from AI usage over salaried employees, according to Anthropic.
But recent developments have also shown that ostensibly higher-order work may be vulnerable to many of the same disruptions.
After Anthropic launched Cowork in February — a Claude variant capable of handling more complex tasks like financial modeling and data management — stocks of companies ranging from software to research firms saw a broad selloff as investors were spooked by the implications of these launches.
As companies like Anthropic and Alibaba invest billions into agentic AI, developing models now able to perform actions autonomously with limited user supervision, it may become even harder to tell how…