AI will hurt a lot of people, says DeepMind co-founder – 05/10/2023 – Tech

Advances in artificial intelligence will threaten white-collar workers and create “a huge number of losers” over the next 10 years, according to one of the founders of the DeepMind artificial intelligence lab, which pioneered the technology.

“It is unquestionable that many of the white collar jobs will be very different in the next five to ten years… there will be a lot of losers [e eles] they will be very unhappy, very agitated”, said Mustafa Suleyman, in a lecture at the Bridge Forum, of the investment manager GIC, in San Francisco this Tuesday (9).

Suleyman left DeepMind last year and set up his own chatbot company, Inflection AI.

Excitement over advances in technology has been tempered by fears that with the changes AI tools will bring to everything from medical diagnosis to teaching and writing, a host of jobs will be eradicated.

Recent research by Goldman Sachs bank predicted that advances in generative artificial intelligence could increase the planet’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by 7% per year over a ten-year period, due to increased productivity. However, this could cause “significant disruption” to the workforce, with up to 300 million jobs potentially exposed to automation.

Suleyman said governments would need to think about how to support the people whose jobs would be destroyed, and he mentioned universal basic income as a possible solution: “Material compensation would be needed… It’s a political and economic measure that we have to start thinking about speak seriously”.

Artificial intelligence startups have made huge technological leaps in the past six months, and companies have invested billions of dollars in AI startups. Microsoft invested heavily in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, earlier this year, valuing the company at around $30 billion.

The launch of a series of tools, such as ChatGPT —which allows users to generate a series of text, image or video results from natural language inputs— has put “generative artificial intelligence” in the spotlight and generated a wave of enthusiasm in the technology investment community.

Google, which acquired DeepMind in 2014, has been developing its own language models such as LaMDA and PaLM. However, the company was taken by surprise with the launch of ChatGPT in November of last year.

With LaMDA, “We had ChatGPT a year and a half before ChatGPT. It was frustrating, really frustrating to see ChatGPT explode,” Suleyman said.

Google, he added, is well positioned in the battle to dominate the new wave of AI tools, but ChatGPT has them “doing a little dance”.

The arms race between Microsoft, Google and a host of other “chatbot” creators, including Inflection and Cohere, which raised $250 million (R$1.2 billion) in a capitalization round in which it was valued at US$ 2 billion (R$ 9.9 billion) last week, is expanding the frontiers of artificial intelligence.

“The last decade was defined by classification and prediction, now we’re looking at interaction … the rigidity of the format will disappear and everything will feel more dynamic and personalized,” said Suleyman, whose company launched its own “chatbot” called Pi (an abbreviation of “personalized intelligence”), last week

Translated by Paulo Migliacci