Billionaire Reid Hoffman doesn’t necessarily think AI will take your job. But, the co-founder of LinkedIn and the PayPal division believes, if you’re in an employee position, technology will almost certainly require you to change the way you work — and in just a few years instead of decades.
Hoffman, a partner at venture capital firm Greylock, made the comments during a This week in startups Podcast episode Released on Wednesday.
The way he sees it, AI is advancing at such a pace that “we’ll have a personal assistant for any professional media task (within) 2 to 5 years.” The change will happen in any role in which something is done with the information: “I process the information, and you do something with it—make an investment decision, write a memo, write a prescription, or something.”
He added that AI adoption wouldn’t even be across sectors: “Now, what is adoption going to look like, is it going to be good for the fundamentals, there’s a variety of things – but as an amplifier, like inflationary intelligence versus AI, it’s amazing off the charts.”
As an early investor and advisor to OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-4 AI chatbots — Hoffman has thought the most about the implications for the technology. He recently published a book–Improvised: Amplifying our humanity through artificial intelligence– Co-written by GPT-4.
Hoffman is optimistic about the impact of artificial intelligence on humanity, but does not overlook concerns that it will be used to do work currently performed by white-collar professionals.
Judging by the musings of IBM President Arvind Krishna, the use of the “personal assistant” mentioned by Hoffman may turn out to be more mandatory than optional.
Krishna wrote recently luck Editorial, “We must begin preparing the workforce to collaborate with AI tools.” The tools will tackle the kind of tasks most people find repetitive, freeing up employees to take on higher value work.
Whether technology “liberates” workers or makes them redundant is up for debate. Krishna recently said that IBM will slow or suspend hiring for back-office jobs. “I could easily see 30% of that being replaced by AI and automation over five years,” he said. (Bloomberg estimated This would translate to more than 7,000 jobs lost, although IBM later clarified this. luck that rather than stop mass hiring, the company will be “very selective” about hiring for positions that are not customer- or technology-focused.)
The employees who survive an AI-powered workforce reduction could be the ones who learn how best to work alongside the technology.
Kara McWilliams, head of the ETS Product Innovation Labs, which offers a tool that can identify answers generated by AI and Tell the financial times earlier this year.
“There is no doubt that many tasks in white-collar land will look very different in the next five to 10 years,” Mostafa Soliman, co-founder of the DeepMind artificial intelligence lab, told attendees at the GIC Bridge Forum in San Francisco this week. “There will be a great number of losers (and they) will be very unhappy, very upset.”
Plus, there may be more pressure from bosses to do more in a single day thanks to AI James Clarke, CEO of digital marketing firm Clearlink, recently told his team: “Many content writers today use AI exclusively for writing. I can do it in About 30 minutes out of an eight-hour workday. So what do we have to do? Let’s put in 30 to 50 times our normal output.”
request on This week in startups How much work currently done by humans can be transferred to tools like GPT-4, Hoffman said, it depends on the job. But if you’re doing something like writing reports, for example, or taking minutes, “you’re probably 50% to 80% more likely to answer… What used to take you three hours to do will now take 15.”
Hoffman added, on a hopeful note, that the employee might use the extra time to report “much better in that time frame.”
Whether the manager will need to be better is an open question.
