Advances in artificial intelligence will threaten white-collar workers and create “a large number of losers” over the next decade, according to one of the founders of the DeepMind AI lab that pioneered the technology.
“Undoubtedly, many tasks in the white-collar field will look very different in the next five to 10 years . . . “There will be a large number of The losers (and they are) will be very unhappy, very upset.” Solomon left DeepMind last year and started his own chatbot company Inflection AI.
Excitement about advances in technology has been tempered by concerns that AI tools are shaking up everything from medical diagnostics to teaching and copywriting, as a host of jobs will be eliminated.
Recent research by Goldman Sachs predicted that advances in generative AI could boost annual global GDP by 7 percent over 10 years due to productivity boosts. However, it could cause “significant disruption” to the workforce, with up to 300 million jobs potentially affected by automation.
Soliman said that governments need to think about how they can support those whose jobs would be destroyed, with universal basic income, one possible solution: “This needs material compensation… This is a political and economic measure that we have to start talking about in a serious way.”
Startups in the field of artificial intelligence have made great technological leaps in the past six months, and companies have poured billions of dollars of investment into startups in this sector. Microsoft invested heavily in ChatGPT creator OpenAI earlier this year, valuing the company at nearly $30 billion.
The launch of a suite of tools such as ChatGPT — which allows users to generate a set of text, image, or video outputs from natural language input — has brought “generative AI” to light and sent a wave of buzz through the tech investment community.
Google, which acquired DeepMind in 2014, is developing its own language models such as LaMDA and PaLM. But the company caught a cold when ChatGPT was launched in November last year.
With LaMDA, “We ran ChatGPT a year and a half before ChatGPT. It was frustrating, even frustrating to see ChatGPT explode,” Solomon said.
He added that Google was firmly in its fight to dominate the new wave of AI tools, but ChatGPT made it “dance a little”.
The arms race between Microsoft, Google, and a host of other chatbot creators including Inflection and Cohere, which raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation last week, is pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence.
“The past decade has been defined by classification and definition, and now we’re looking at interaction . . . Solomon, whose company launched chatbot Pi, short for Personal Intelligence, said last week: