Voters are expressing more optimism about artificial intelligence than they did two years ago, but many are still skeptical. However, tech companies are pushing forward with the latest artificial intelligence technology.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly active users. According to the platform, large language models or LLMs are used for a wide variety of tasks like business, education, software development and content creation.
Before many of the chatbots we know today, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed what is believed to be the first of its kind. Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program made communication with a computer possible. He tested the technology on his assistant soon after it was developed.
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“After two or three interchanges with the machine, she turned to me and said ‘would you mind leaving the room please?'” Weizenbaum said at the time.
A decade after his ELIZA report, Weizenbaum authored another paper, warning against giving machines the ability to make human choices. He would spend the rest of his life skeptical of artificial intelligence.
“Movies like ‘The Terminator’ have created a very dark dystopian version of what this could look like,” White House A.I. and Crypto Czar David Sacks said. “The version of the future of AI that I think is probably most accurate if you want to pop cultural reference, is ‘Star Trek: Enterprise.’ Think about the ship computer in that. You can talk to it. It can talk to you. It understands. It can perform tasks for you. But it doesn’t have a will of its own, it doesn’t have a mind of its own. It’s there to help the crew, and it needs to be supervised by humans.”
A McKinsey Global survey on A.I. asked participants representing companies around the world if they used artificial intelligence at work. Seventy-eight percent said their organizations used the technology in at least one business function.
Now the technology is threatening some jobs, including the field that developed A.I.
“First, people just wrote code. Then there was the autocomplete era,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said at a June Databricks conference. “Now we’re moving to what Andrej Karpathy has called vibe coding that has come to be associated with coding models, and Claude in particular, which is where you kind of ask the model to do something, and it’s very interactive.”
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Tech companies say A.I. is helping software developers write code and solve certain problems. Many of the models are rapidly improving and competing with humans for certain tasks.
“I think if you’re an executive in a technology company, it’s utterly familiar to be automating yourself out of a job. But really what they’re doing is automating themselves out of the task,” said Gregory Allen, senior advisor with the Wadhwani A.I. center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Google has announced layoffs as it transforms its search engine, which now has an A.I. mode. Security company Crowdstrike noted A.I. was “reshaping every industry” as it announced layoffs for five percent of its workforce. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that parts of Meta’s workforce would face layoffs as the company focused on developing artificial intelligence.
“Our bet is that in the next year, probably, maybe half the development is going to be done by A.I. as opposed to people. And then that will just increase from there,” Zuckerberg said at a conference in April.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a message in June, “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.” The note came as Amazon rolls out new generative A.I. Microsoft plans to lay off four percent of its workforce by streamlining its products and procedures with fewer managers.
“Although AI plays a role, the reality is, one of the keys to being a successful business, especially in an industry that changes as much and as quickly as technology, is you constantly have to adjust your workforce,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said. “So every summer, this time of year, we take stock. And we ask, what new jobs do we need to create? What jobs do not need anymore? I think it always requires a huge amount of empathy for people who are negatively impacted, but it is what makes a company successful. It’s what makes the American economy so dynamic.”
However, experts and tech companies believe the job market will eventually balance out.
“Ultimately I think that we’re going to see a productivity boom, we’re gonna see a lot of new startup formation, and we’re see a lot of job growth,” Sacks said.
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