The rise of generative AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT is in its early stages, and many in the market are still unconvinced of its economic and social impact, if surprised by its skill.
In a recent interview with Becky Quick on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Warren Buffett said that while ChatGPT wrote him a song in Spanish, “it’s an incredible piece of technology progress, showing what we’re capable of,” he said, not convinced by the world’s end result. “I think it’s extraordinary, but I don’t know if it’s beneficial,” he said.
He did say that one of the things that impressed him was the technology’s time-saving features.
“It can tell you that it’s read every book, every legal opinion. I mean, if you’re doing all kinds of stuff, the amount of time it can save you is unbelievable,” Buffett said.
This is where CEOs in the field of generative AI focus.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in an interview after being named No. 1 on this year’s 2023 CNBC Disruptor list that the legal industry is a good example.
“What we’re hearing from clients who use our law firm API is that it’s revolutionizing the way they work and the efficiency and accuracy any lawyer can achieve, giving people more time to do what they’re really good at things, and having this new tool gives them as much leverage as possible,” Altman said.
This bolsters what a tech executive who works directly with law firms previously told CNBC of his legal and accounting firm clients that the sentiment now is not that AI will replace lawyers, but that “lawyers using AI will replace lawyers .. . . . These professionals will become more efficient, more efficient, and they will be able to do more,” he said.
“It’s a pattern we’ve seen time and time again across many industries, and I’m really excited about it,” Altman said. “I do think it’s going to touch pretty much everything.”
There isn’t a lot of research to support these arguments yet, but early data does support anecdotal evidence. A study published by MIT researchers Data from March showed that employees were 37% more productive using ChatGPT.
Aidan Gomez, CEO of generative AI startup Cohere, ranked No. 44 on this year’s Disruptor 50 list, pointed to the MIT study in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, saying: People are amazed,” he said. “That’s on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. What the steam engine did for mechanical work, mechanical labor, this technology will do for intellectual labor.”
In his comments to CNBC, Gomez emphasized that the study has not been peer-reviewed. The authors of the MIT study, Whitney Zhang and Shakked Noy, were unavailable for comment because the study is currently being submitted to a journal for peer review and publication.
Separately, a new study by researchers at Stanford University and the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 14% increase in productivityon average, when a customer service agent at a retail company uses an AI-based generative conversational assistant.
Generative AI has already begun to “significantly impact workers”
Cohere’s platform allows developers and businesses of all sizes – even those without machine learning expertise – to integrate AI capabilities such as copywriting, search, conversational AI, summarization or Content moderation. Cohere partners with AI customer service technology provider the living And it has cloud deals with Google, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle. sales force is an investor in the company, one of the first investments the customer relationship management tech giant made in a new AI fund this year. Gomez and co-founder Nick Frosst came from Google Brain, an exploratory deep learning artificial intelligence team that is now part of Google Research.while in letterGoogle, Gomez and other researchers helped develop a new approach to natural language processing — a transformer — that enables systems to more accurately grasp the context of words.
Comments like Gomez’s have sparked debate over whether AI will replace or augment humans. In sectors such as education, these concerns are already serious. Gomez agrees with most AI executives in sticking to the “augmentation” script.
“What you’re going to see is humans are going to be ten times more productive,” he said.
He did say that we should be wary of companies citing AI as a reason for future layoffs. He hoped someone would make excuses.
But for now, workers also have an advantage, Gomez said: the time it takes to integrate AI technology into existing tech stacks.
“The reality is that over the next five years, it’s going to be a slow process and you have time to adjust and change your job,” he said. “Frankly, you’re going to love it.”
His comments make it clear that workers better get used to it.
“We’re ahead of real deployment, so I think all this work is brewing underwater just to change every product, every company.”
The MIT study provides a more mixed assessment of workers and labor market outcomes. The productivity gains of college-educated professionals performing mid-level professional writing tasks were deemed “significant,” and the study showed these workers performed tasks “significantly faster.” At the same time, employees who initially underperformed saw an increase in output and a decrease in time spent on tasks. But the MIT researchers aren’t sure if that means the outlook favors job preservation.
“Experimental evidence suggests that ChatGPT largely substitutes for worker effort rather than complements worker skills, which may lead to a reduction in demand for workers, creating an unfavorable distribution as capital owners work at the expense of workers effect,” they wrote.
The researchers also noted limitations of their study. First, the tasks “are relatively short, self-contained, and lack the dimension of specific contextual knowledge, which may inflate our estimates of ChatGPT’s usefulness.” They cannot draw conclusions about overall job satisfaction from the results, and while capturing When discussing “the direct, immediate impact of ChatGPT on selected occupations”, they fail to account for the many other factors that affect labor markets and production systems as they adapt to new technologies such as ChatGPT, or how artificial intelligence will affect each occupation, task and Skill levels.
The only conclusion they confidently draw in their paper is: “At present, we provide evidence that generative AI technologies will — and have already begun — to have a significant impact on workers.”
Watch the full CNBC Disruptor 50 interview above to learn more from the leading generative AI CEO on how work will unfold in the next few years.