It’s been increasingly apparent to anyone following the recent developments in AI that it could end up making lots of jobs redundant, and the person at the forefront of the most visible manifestation of this new technology thinks so too.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI which has made ChatGPT, says that ChatGPT will eliminate lots of current jobs. “It is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, that’s true,” he said in an interview. But Altman put a positive spin on the prediction. “We can make much better (jobs). The reason to develop AI at all, in terms of impact on our lives and improving our lives and upside, this will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed,” he added.
Altman said that models such as ChatGPT will reshape society. He also said that it will inevitably change how education is imparted. “Education is going to have to change. But it’s happened many other times with technology. When we got the calculator, the way we taught math and what we tested students on totally changed,” he said.
Meanwhile, in a separate study, OpenAI has revealed which jobs it expects to be most impacted by ChatGPT. The most affected professions include nearly all white-collar jobs including interpreters and translators, poets, lyricists and creative writers, public relations specialists, writers and authors, mathematicians, tax preparers, blockchain engineers, accountants and auditors, along with journalists. The study estimated that for 19% of US jobs, ChatGPT could render 50% of tasks meaningless, while another 10% of tasks at 80% of US jobs could be automated as well.
These are big numbers, and point to the extent to which ChatGPT — and other similar models — could impact human life in the coming years. Automating away large portions of jobs could enable employees to cut headcount, and cause many jobs to be lost. But the field could also lead to the creation of new jobs — companies, for instance, are now hiring for prompt engineers, whose task is to give detailed instructions to ChatGPT to produce the desired outputs. It remains to be seen how ChatGPT’s impact plays out, but the company behind the product seems to believe that it will significantly change our lives in the years to come.