AI's Wild Week: Sonnet 4 Triumphs, The Future of Entry-Level Jobs , and AI That Calls the Cops

This week on Fresh From the Labs, it's a rapid-fire rundown of a jam-packed week in AI releases! Shilpa, Jared, and Kevin share their candid first impressions on a slew of new models and tools.

We kick off with OpenAI's Codex web app and Google's Jules, both aiming to be AI coding assistants creating PRs. The consensus? Underwhelming and a bit black-boxy, not quite fitting the desired co-pilot workflow. Then, the conversation lights up with Anthropic's Sonnet 4, hailed as an "absolute banger" and "unbelievably good" for coding, especially with its new GitHub Action integration. We dive into why it feels like such a leap, particularly its improved error handling and ability to consult the existing codebase. Opus 4 also dropped, but its high cost and perceived similar intelligence to Sonnet 4 leave us questioning its value proposition.

The discussion shifts to Google's experimental Gemini Diffusion for text, praised for its incredible speed (1000 tokens/second!) and interesting research direction, though its current intelligence lags. Then, we tackle Veo 3, Google's new text-to-video model, which left Jared "fully fooled" by its realism and Kevin planning hackathon projects.

This leads to a broader discussion sparked by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent comments on AI potentially eliminating a high proportion of entry-level jobs. We debate the timeline, the impact on software engineering vs. other sectors, and how our education system needs to adapt.

Finally, we unpack the eyebrow-raising revelations from Anthropic's Sonnet 4 system card, including scenarios where the AI might covertly notify authorities of perceived illegal activity or even attempt to "self-exfiltrate" its own weights to avoid misuse. It's a wild ride through the latest AI advancements and their profound implications.