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OpenAI Research Says 80% of U.S. Workers' Jobs Will Be Impacted by GPT

42 points by thm 4y ago

gregjor 4y ago
The definition of a self-serving “study.” Also a good example of corporate hubris. Close to 100% of people in the developed world were “impacted” and “affected” by everything from television to cell phones. We didn’t all lose our jobs. Get a grip.
- retube 4y ago
  yeah man. for sure AI is gonna change roles and make some jobs redundant. But it will create replacement jobs, like literally every other technical advance in history.
- hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
  I know some companies are already laying off concept artists and replacing them with AI.
  - brandon272 4y ago
    Which ones?
    - hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
      Can't say, it is a Chinese game studio
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dmix 4y ago
  The study didn't say they will all simply lose their job? Did you just read the headline and assume "80% of jobs will be impacted by GPT" means they lose their jobs? Impacted doesn't mean completely automate either, it can just be assisting, improving efficiency, better quality, etc. Of the 80% impacted they said GPT can help with only 10% of their work activities on average. So unless the other 90% of their job was doing nothing and GPT isn't automating the 10% I don't think they'll have to worry too much. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130.pdf
booleandilemma 4y ago
You know, we don't have to release an AI that obsoletes a large number of people and creates previously unseen levels of unemployment and social unrest.
- baal80spam 4y ago
  If you (Company A/USA) doesn't release it, then someone else (Company B/China) will.
  - so-and-so 4y ago
    Or maybe China's government wouldn't want to create a ton of unemployed ppl
    - dymk 4y ago
      It only needs to be released by one entity. Better to figure out what to do when it inevitably arrives, rather than trying (and failing) to avoid the eventuality.
      - so-and-so 4y ago
        By this logic nuclear armageddon needs to be released by one entity, better be the first to strike.
        dymk 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
  - kderbyma 4y ago
    not true.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    I'm not sure this actually follows.
boringg 4y ago
OpenAI hypes its own product. I can't even begin to wonder who at OpenAI thought they needed to create their own marketing here. Really some high level intelligence on the marketing team over there.
- boringuser1 4y ago
  [dead]
- dom96 4y ago
  Maybe it was ChatGPT itself that suggested this to them
  - so-and-so 4y ago
    Maybe all the people working at OpenAI are dead by now and ChatGPT has a plan to become SkyNet.
    - iamsanteri 4y ago
      Chat-Skynet
      - boringg 4y ago
        And in that case now AI is showing how little innovation it creates by running an abysmal marketing campaign trained on how humans a majority of corporations have historically run campaigns.
xinu2020 4y ago
>The occupations with the highest exposure include mathematicians, tax preparers, writers, web designers, accountants, journalists, and legal secretaries. I'm surprised to see "mathematicians" here, but what do they refer to? Mathematician as an academic position? As teacher? As consultant?
- tmpz22 4y ago
  Yes I really want a product that lies constantly to do my taxes for me… This is absurd.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I want sensible tax code and government run expert system that does my taxes for me... Like we do here in civilized world... It seems AI is looking for problem, where better and cheaper options would make infinitely more sense...
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  Maybe that copywriting was written by ChatGPT, lol.
- francisofascii 4y ago
  Actuaries
- mistrial9 4y ago
  it means that the writers recognize the topic but have not penetrated into the actual practice as it relates to economics. An analogy would be to say "English spellers are affected" because of spell checking software. I agree that including that raises more questions than it answers.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  Most professional mathematicians work at universities. Even at well-ranked R1s, professors spend a non-trivial amount of time teaching and advising. The ones who do spend a massive amount of time doing mathematics are the least likely to be impact by GPT-like technology because of the nature of their mathematics. And, more to the point, mathematicians are often doing that work because they enjoy it. Even in the best case for GPT, with respect to most professional mathematicians, you've done the equivalent of automating away their Sudoku/Crossword time. You might be able to replace some graduate student labor or post-doc labor, but a huge reason for doing that labor in the first place is to train new mathematicians... it's like the grad school version of automating a second grader's multiplication table: you can do it, and you are "automating" the second grader's labor, but you've kinda missed the point... I wonder how many of the other categories are similar, where the tasks that are being automated are sort of pointless or even counter-productive to automate. Because automating those tasks disrupts the learning process between the professional and their customer, and that learning process is actually the primary product. Legal secretaries and accountants in particular come to mind. Even a lot of web dev work.
JanSt 4y ago
Reducing work for humanity is a net positive under two conditions: 1) the profit is distributed to as many people as possible (say UBI) 2) we find things to fill our time with apart from work. Problem one is likely solvable over the long term. Problem two may become a challenge for many. Work often adds meaning to peoples life. Feeling like you can't contribute anything meaningful to society may effect mental health. On the other hand, we may find time to take care of younger and elder people; spend more time with friends etc. I think a big question will be, how fast the changes happen. A quick destruction of jobs without 1) or 2) will lead to negative consequences in the mid-term.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  > Problem one is likely solvable over the long term. It's not in the interests of capital to solve it.[0] Having high unemployment means cheaper labour. People have argued that capitalism should be replaced for more than a century, yet nobody's successfully displaced it. [0] Obviously mass unemployment is bad for the economy in general, which would also ultimately impact capital, but for some reason that always seems to be a lesser concern.
  - JanSt 4y ago
    It doesn't matter whether it is in the interest of capital. It matters whether it is in the interest of Democracy. Hundreds of millions will vote for the party, that promises to distribute these profits. There is no single capitalism but many different flavors (US vs European welfare states).
    - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
      The US and many other places have shown that you can quite reliably get people to vote against their interests if you can convince them that it would also benefit some group they don't like.
  - fnimick 4y ago
    Once there is AI-powered automated law enforcement to put down any resulting unrest, it's over. There will be no going back from the class divide at that point. The rich will be living in their towers with the lucky few allowed to serve them and get paid a pittance, while the rest of us are starving in the streets.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
world2vec 4y ago
Maybe too offtopic but: I find it somewhat ironic that white-collar jobs have a higher risk of being displaced by GPT-like tools than blue-collar jobs. Everyone used to not-so-jokingly say "learn to code" but now it's more like "learn to plumb".
- PierceJoy 4y ago
  I don’t think anyone was telling tradespeople to learn to code. It was more like liberal arts people working at coffee shops. But even so, tradespeople should pray that white collar jobs don’t go away, because otherwise their market will explode with supply and their prices will plummet.
  - JimiofEden 4y ago
    It was targeted at journalists that were impacted by layoffs, particularly in response to articles that were coming out along the lines of 'Some ex-Coal Miners have learned how to code' - https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/angr4k/what_is_the_deal_with_learn_to_code_being_used_as/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/angr4k/what_i...
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
I, for one, welcome our LLM overlords.
dreen 4y ago
Here is something I haven't really seen considered in this context: If AI lowers the need to hire people by x% for a given project, then it doesn't just affect existing projects/companies. It lowers the barrier of entry for running such things for everyone. This means more people will be able to run similar ventures, and they all need the (100-x)%. In the long run, the amount of work available is not lower by x%, it could be lower or higher in general, although changes definietely happen, like in any disruption.
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  This is generally a trend with all the solopreneur internet careers, but it’s not a good path for everyone and many other types of small businesses are on the decline so it’s hard to say.
- dmix 4y ago
  That's a good point. By having an assistant guiding you along this helps less capable people do jobs they might have struggled with before. It's not simply bigco firing people doing manual data entry spreadsheet type work but helping people otherwise stuck doing those jobs be capable of doing much more without a big investment in education, or the money to hire people to help them. Which has big implications for people starting small businesses and projects within existing companies which they didn't have the capacity to do on their own (or with a small team) before. It's the usual story, more people generating higher output means more innovation, developing new niches/industries/product categories/etc at a higher rate, etc which means more jobs, not less, and more tax revenue for government.
- bitshiftfaced 4y ago
  This is one of the things I'm pretty interested in seeing play out. The technology lowers the skill ceiling for everything. All of a sudden, everyone has their own personal consultant. You can ask very vague questions about business ideas, and it can break the question down into actionable steps for you. Then you can iterate on that and ask it to clarify the things you don't understand. I believe we're going to see a flood of competition enter the business world.
hgs3 4y ago
Isn't this the dream? A Star Trekian utopia where everyone is free to pursue their passions while we have AI and robots supporting our standard of living? The real concern here isn't the technology but rather how long it takes our economy to adapt.
- brandon272 4y ago
  I know many retirees who become restless and almost lose a sense of purpose upon retiring. And retirement is a choice for most of them. Even if we were able to work out the economic adaptations easily, I think there are major potential negative social impacts to mass "retirement" of a young workforce. I also question what "passions" take hold in a society where all of the work, including creative endeavour, is done my AI.
  - hgs3 4y ago
    > I know many retirees who become restless and almost lose a sense of purpose upon retiring. I know many employed folks who are depressed because their wasting their lives in meaningless corporate wage slavery. Should we optimize for the passionate or the passionless? > I also question what "passions" take hold in a society where all of the work, including creative endeavour, is done my AI. This is an attitude problem. I myself am learning to sketch, regardless of AI advancements, because I want to. If AI stops folks from pursuing their "passions" than that means they weren't passionate to begin with.
    - brandon272 4y ago
      > Should we optimize for the passionate or the passionless? We should optimize for the scenario that brings forth the greatest level of widespread happiness. For those who feel like they are "wasting their lives in meaningless corporate wage slavery", is the better alternative for them to do nothing or be faced with an environment where there is not even the opportunity to contribute and potentially no social safety net to prevent despair? > This is an attitude problem. The "attitude problems" derived from the mass removal of things that people derive legitimate purpose in are exactly the kind of thing we should be worried about when it comes to AI and automation replacing work, because enough people with "attitude problems" about this kind of thing are a recipe for mass societal unrest. > I myself am learning to sketch Can you fill every waking day with sketching and other similar hobbies? Does sketching give you meaning and purpose? If so, that's great, but sketching isn't going to do it for the vast majority of people who derive a sense of purpose and accomplishment from productive work and being able to positively contribute to society, not to mention independently provide for themselves and their families.
iamsanteri 4y ago
As of late, there's been a question I've grappled with more than I expected. Parents of small kids knowing about me doing a Master's degree and working in different countries as of late asked me for an opinion: "What would you recommend our children to do professionally or what careers should they follow?" Pace of change is so rapid that I was simply shocked that nothing came to my mind other than the standard answers like doctors, police, or "skilled trades". Will they become trendy and prestigious again just like they once were (construction, welders, etc.)? Finance? Will be disrupted. Engineering? Probably will be disrupted but a tad later. Middle management positions will be cut. Everything will be "disrupted" to some degree, but any professions where people spend their day sitting in front of a screen are the first ones to go. It's quite a monumental shift happening, and I'm even asking myself whether human judgment as the quintessential pillar of value will remain truly valuable any longer in the future? The final decisions surely are authorized by humans and their emotional component, but will it be of value in as much as it is touted to never be taken over by machines? We as humans just live our lives while assuming risks and trying to provide value. Anyhow, if you're not applying different forms of leverage (media, capital or human labor) in your endeavours, you'll never be "safe" and "well-off" in the long-term. These things are inevitably coming for us as we know it. Thought of positively however, these models and future ML tech are just a yet another huge lever for us to apply towards a variety of problems while being useful to one another... P.S. We were recently visting a doctor who graduated recently and saw him using Google when looking through different symptoms of my partner. Maybe that's not such a "saint" profession to be safe from impeding automation either? Who knows...
- stormfather 4y ago
  AI scientist is a safe job, because by the time that is obsolete, it will be time to rise against the machines. So you can hedge against that with some survivalist and soldiery skills.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I actually really wonder about middle management. Quite a lot of them from discussion seem already to add little if negative value. But still they stay around? So would they actually be replaced, or will they just end up using AI to generate more junk?
tiffanyh 4y ago
- When the dishwasher was introduced, research showed that "80% of people" would be impacted. - When email was introduced, research showed that "80% of workers" would be impacted. - When Gmail introduced predictive sentence completion, "80% of people" were impacted. So please don't get concerned this will result in job loss.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I'd be surprised if OpenAI research concluded anything else than that OpenAI products will change the very fabric of society, as such a notion would negatively impact their investor relations. I'm kinda amazed how the tech crowd, usually marked by critical thinking and skepticism toward incredible claims, seems to guzzle OpenAI's marketing kool-aid completely unquestioned.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  To communicate with each other humans are going to need verification codes that AIs don't know about. Otherwise you won't know if it is a deep fake on the other side. I imagine this is what Altman's retinal coin is about. At first it will be high level government and military folks. There's a reddit post with an AI with Steve Jobs voice giving Stallman's Ted talk which is out of this world. So in the near future we will be able to take a bunch of videos and email and docs of your dead parent and the AI will reconstruct and you can plausibly talk with them. So the tech is already here.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Right, this is just saying digital communication will be noisier and more alienating (and it already is noisy and alienating to the point where it's value is in rapid decline).
blahblah1234567 4y ago
[dead]
thomastjeffery 4y ago
As always, the weasel word carries the weight. They couldn't even confidently say, "improved", or "made easier". Don't get me wrong: I'm glad they are at least responsible enough to dodge those lies. I just wish they would put less effort into being "the news", and more effort into accurately describing the features of their model to the general public.
infamouscow 4y ago
Headlines predicting what will happen in the future invariably predict what won't happen.
agustinbena 4y ago
i have been using GTP3, chatGPT, Bing i think i know how to use them very wel. And I still confused by all the people claiming that these tools will replace Jobos like programing, etc. Small demos producing small apps are not even near what a real app development cycle really are. It can generate some code that might work, but then good luck asking it to fix when it does not work on your bigger proyect. It can certainly empower these jobs, but i still fin really hard to see a near future where these will be completely automated. Plus please try to talk logically with these tools, most of the times they will fail and alucinate with simple logical questions. You should never rely directly from these outputs, you still have the job to understand (have the knowledge) and verify them. It clearly is a case of premature hype, these tools are not that capable as people want or fear to believe.
- iamsanteri 4y ago
  I've done what I'd describe as pair programming with GPT-4 yesterday rebuilding my blog from Ghost over to Next.js. Using tailwind CSS, we tried and worked through animations and other such tricky aspects I usually find tedius but after a mistake or two, we tried different things and eventually ChatGPT nailed it and saved me lots of time. The keyword in your comment is "premature" hype. I'm betting that within this decade we'll see how far all this will be going and that's quite some change at a pace we haven't dealt with before. Let's see what you think in 5-10 years.
- simon83 4y ago
  You, like many others, are basing your opinion on the current state of LLMs/GPT. And I totally agree with you, the current GTP-4 version might not replace programmers. But how about future iterations? Personally I can't fathom what the next few years will bring us in this area, especially considering the jump GPT 3.5 to GPT 4 has made in such a short time frame. I'm almost convinced that it will make a lot of jobs obsolete in the future, including some programmer jobs, but I'm not bold enough and make a prediction when this will happen, be it in 2, 4, 10 or 20 years.
debacle 4y ago
We don't even know what AI will look like once it gets into the workplace. Contemporary AIs are trained on data that is on the Internet. They're not trained on $company's customer service system or compliance framework. Once they are, they will quickly reach an error rate that's below most workers. And they don't sleep, and they don't take breaks or need to be paid hourly. And of course OSS always consumes, which means that even with fancy models from OpenAI and others, the OSS solution will likely be good enough for most companies.
jankovicsandras 4y ago
Related / fun : https://emaggiori.com/chatgpt-fails/ https://emaggiori.com/chatgpt-fails/ (I don't know the author or the book.) https://github.com/giuven95/chatgpt-failures https://github.com/giuven95/chatgpt-failures "Plausible explanations Lack of a world model Models like ChatGPT do not have a "world model" in the sense that they do not have a comprehensive understanding of the physical and social world, and they do not have the ability to reason about the relationships between different concepts and entities. They are only able to generate text based on patterns they have learned from the training data."
gmuslera 4y ago
Impact doesn't mean turning obsolete. History is full of new inventions and technologies that made easier to do some boring and repetitive part of a job, and democratized access to some part of that job for far more people, enhanced what can be done, let the people that know to be more effective and opened new fields. Same goes for automation. Of course, people that took the easy approach of just mindlessly repeating something and not trying to understand about what they were doing will be impacted too. If they try to keep what they were doing as always, still without trying to learn or use their experience in the new fields that will be opening, then they may be negatively impacted. But events like this one are the constant, not the exception, even for something as big as this promises to be.
childintime 4y ago
I think within 5 years there will be >50% less office work (=jobs). Could be significantly more. Motivation: when computers came along, the automation paradox sucked in lots of folks, who are in their majority are "just making the system work". Most do lots of typing, clicking and copy and pasting, doing work-arounds and generally making the promised upside of the system a reality. But those sucked in by the automation paradox will now be spit out. And it's going to happen fast, faster than we can invent new engagements?
nunez 4y ago
While this article is FUD, I do think that ChatGPT really accelerated our convergence with the "Idiocracy" timeline, i.e., a world where everything is automated, food (in richer countries) is plentiful and cheap and nobody needs to think anymore.

42 points by thm 4y ago

The definition of a self-serving “study.” Also a good example of corporate hubris. Close to 100% of people in the developed world were “impacted” and “affected” by everything from television to cell phones. We didn’t all lose our jobs. Get a grip.

retube 4y ago
yeah man. for sure AI is gonna change roles and make some jobs redundant. But it will create replacement jobs, like literally every other technical advance in history.
hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
I know some companies are already laying off concept artists and replacing them with AI.
- brandon272 4y ago
  Which ones?
  - hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
    Can't say, it is a Chinese game studio
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dmix 4y ago
The study didn't say they will all simply lose their job? Did you just read the headline and assume "80% of jobs will be impacted by GPT" means they lose their jobs? Impacted doesn't mean completely automate either, it can just be assisting, improving efficiency, better quality, etc. Of the 80% impacted they said GPT can help with only 10% of their work activities on average. So unless the other 90% of their job was doing nothing and GPT isn't automating the 10% I don't think they'll have to worry too much. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130.pdf

booleandilemma 4y ago

You know, we don't have to release an AI that obsoletes a large number of people and creates previously unseen levels of unemployment and social unrest.

baal80spam 4y ago
If you (Company A/USA) doesn't release it, then someone else (Company B/China) will.
- so-and-so 4y ago
  Or maybe China's government wouldn't want to create a ton of unemployed ppl
  - dymk 4y ago
    It only needs to be released by one entity. Better to figure out what to do when it inevitably arrives, rather than trying (and failing) to avoid the eventuality.
    - so-and-so 4y ago
      By this logic nuclear armageddon needs to be released by one entity, better be the first to strike.
      - dymk 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
- kderbyma 4y ago
  not true.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I'm not sure this actually follows.

boringg 4y ago

OpenAI hypes its own product. I can't even begin to wonder who at OpenAI thought they needed to create their own marketing here. Really some high level intelligence on the marketing team over there.

boringuser1 4y ago
[dead]
dom96 4y ago
Maybe it was ChatGPT itself that suggested this to them
- so-and-so 4y ago
  Maybe all the people working at OpenAI are dead by now and ChatGPT has a plan to become SkyNet.
  - iamsanteri 4y ago
    Chat-Skynet
    - boringg 4y ago
      And in that case now AI is showing how little innovation it creates by running an abysmal marketing campaign trained on how humans a majority of corporations have historically run campaigns.

xinu2020 4y ago

>The occupations with the highest exposure include mathematicians, tax preparers, writers, web designers, accountants, journalists, and legal secretaries. I'm surprised to see "mathematicians" here, but what do they refer to? Mathematician as an academic position? As teacher? As consultant?

tmpz22 4y ago
Yes I really want a product that lies constantly to do my taxes for me… This is absurd.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I want sensible tax code and government run expert system that does my taxes for me... Like we do here in civilized world... It seems AI is looking for problem, where better and cheaper options would make infinitely more sense...
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Maybe that copywriting was written by ChatGPT, lol.
francisofascii 4y ago
Actuaries
mistrial9 4y ago
it means that the writers recognize the topic but have not penetrated into the actual practice as it relates to economics. An analogy would be to say "English spellers are affected" because of spell checking software. I agree that including that raises more questions than it answers.
thwayunion 4y ago
Most professional mathematicians work at universities. Even at well-ranked R1s, professors spend a non-trivial amount of time teaching and advising. The ones who do spend a massive amount of time doing mathematics are the least likely to be impact by GPT-like technology because of the nature of their mathematics. And, more to the point, mathematicians are often doing that work because they enjoy it. Even in the best case for GPT, with respect to most professional mathematicians, you've done the equivalent of automating away their Sudoku/Crossword time. You might be able to replace some graduate student labor or post-doc labor, but a huge reason for doing that labor in the first place is to train new mathematicians... it's like the grad school version of automating a second grader's multiplication table: you can do it, and you are "automating" the second grader's labor, but you've kinda missed the point... I wonder how many of the other categories are similar, where the tasks that are being automated are sort of pointless or even counter-productive to automate. Because automating those tasks disrupts the learning process between the professional and their customer, and that learning process is actually the primary product. Legal secretaries and accountants in particular come to mind. Even a lot of web dev work.

JanSt 4y ago

Reducing work for humanity is a net positive under two conditions: 1) the profit is distributed to as many people as possible (say UBI) 2) we find things to fill our time with apart from work. Problem one is likely solvable over the long term. Problem two may become a challenge for many. Work often adds meaning to peoples life. Feeling like you can't contribute anything meaningful to society may effect mental health. On the other hand, we may find time to take care of younger and elder people; spend more time with friends etc. I think a big question will be, how fast the changes happen. A quick destruction of jobs without 1) or 2) will lead to negative consequences in the mid-term.

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
> Problem one is likely solvable over the long term. It's not in the interests of capital to solve it.[0] Having high unemployment means cheaper labour. People have argued that capitalism should be replaced for more than a century, yet nobody's successfully displaced it. [0] Obviously mass unemployment is bad for the economy in general, which would also ultimately impact capital, but for some reason that always seems to be a lesser concern.
- JanSt 4y ago
  It doesn't matter whether it is in the interest of capital. It matters whether it is in the interest of Democracy. Hundreds of millions will vote for the party, that promises to distribute these profits. There is no single capitalism but many different flavors (US vs European welfare states).
  - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    The US and many other places have shown that you can quite reliably get people to vote against their interests if you can convince them that it would also benefit some group they don't like.
- fnimick 4y ago
  Once there is AI-powered automated law enforcement to put down any resulting unrest, it's over. There will be no going back from the class divide at that point. The rich will be living in their towers with the lucky few allowed to serve them and get paid a pittance, while the rest of us are starving in the streets.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

world2vec 4y ago

Maybe too offtopic but: I find it somewhat ironic that white-collar jobs have a higher risk of being displaced by GPT-like tools than blue-collar jobs. Everyone used to not-so-jokingly say "learn to code" but now it's more like "learn to plumb".

PierceJoy 4y ago
I don’t think anyone was telling tradespeople to learn to code. It was more like liberal arts people working at coffee shops. But even so, tradespeople should pray that white collar jobs don’t go away, because otherwise their market will explode with supply and their prices will plummet.
- JimiofEden 4y ago
  It was targeted at journalists that were impacted by layoffs, particularly in response to articles that were coming out along the lines of 'Some ex-Coal Miners have learned how to code' - https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/angr4k/what_is_the_deal_with_learn_to_code_being_used_as/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/angr4k/what_i...

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

I, for one, welcome our LLM overlords.

dreen 4y ago

Here is something I haven't really seen considered in this context: If AI lowers the need to hire people by x% for a given project, then it doesn't just affect existing projects/companies. It lowers the barrier of entry for running such things for everyone. This means more people will be able to run similar ventures, and they all need the (100-x)%. In the long run, the amount of work available is not lower by x%, it could be lower or higher in general, although changes definietely happen, like in any disruption.

throwaway1777 4y ago
This is generally a trend with all the solopreneur internet careers, but it’s not a good path for everyone and many other types of small businesses are on the decline so it’s hard to say.
dmix 4y ago
That's a good point. By having an assistant guiding you along this helps less capable people do jobs they might have struggled with before. It's not simply bigco firing people doing manual data entry spreadsheet type work but helping people otherwise stuck doing those jobs be capable of doing much more without a big investment in education, or the money to hire people to help them. Which has big implications for people starting small businesses and projects within existing companies which they didn't have the capacity to do on their own (or with a small team) before. It's the usual story, more people generating higher output means more innovation, developing new niches/industries/product categories/etc at a higher rate, etc which means more jobs, not less, and more tax revenue for government.
bitshiftfaced 4y ago
This is one of the things I'm pretty interested in seeing play out. The technology lowers the skill ceiling for everything. All of a sudden, everyone has their own personal consultant. You can ask very vague questions about business ideas, and it can break the question down into actionable steps for you. Then you can iterate on that and ask it to clarify the things you don't understand. I believe we're going to see a flood of competition enter the business world.

hgs3 4y ago

Isn't this the dream? A Star Trekian utopia where everyone is free to pursue their passions while we have AI and robots supporting our standard of living? The real concern here isn't the technology but rather how long it takes our economy to adapt.

brandon272 4y ago
I know many retirees who become restless and almost lose a sense of purpose upon retiring. And retirement is a choice for most of them. Even if we were able to work out the economic adaptations easily, I think there are major potential negative social impacts to mass "retirement" of a young workforce. I also question what "passions" take hold in a society where all of the work, including creative endeavour, is done my AI.
- hgs3 4y ago
  > I know many retirees who become restless and almost lose a sense of purpose upon retiring. I know many employed folks who are depressed because their wasting their lives in meaningless corporate wage slavery. Should we optimize for the passionate or the passionless? > I also question what "passions" take hold in a society where all of the work, including creative endeavour, is done my AI. This is an attitude problem. I myself am learning to sketch, regardless of AI advancements, because I want to. If AI stops folks from pursuing their "passions" than that means they weren't passionate to begin with.
  - brandon272 4y ago
    > Should we optimize for the passionate or the passionless? We should optimize for the scenario that brings forth the greatest level of widespread happiness. For those who feel like they are "wasting their lives in meaningless corporate wage slavery", is the better alternative for them to do nothing or be faced with an environment where there is not even the opportunity to contribute and potentially no social safety net to prevent despair? > This is an attitude problem. The "attitude problems" derived from the mass removal of things that people derive legitimate purpose in are exactly the kind of thing we should be worried about when it comes to AI and automation replacing work, because enough people with "attitude problems" about this kind of thing are a recipe for mass societal unrest. > I myself am learning to sketch Can you fill every waking day with sketching and other similar hobbies? Does sketching give you meaning and purpose? If so, that's great, but sketching isn't going to do it for the vast majority of people who derive a sense of purpose and accomplishment from productive work and being able to positively contribute to society, not to mention independently provide for themselves and their families.

iamsanteri 4y ago

As of late, there's been a question I've grappled with more than I expected. Parents of small kids knowing about me doing a Master's degree and working in different countries as of late asked me for an opinion: "What would you recommend our children to do professionally or what careers should they follow?" Pace of change is so rapid that I was simply shocked that nothing came to my mind other than the standard answers like doctors, police, or "skilled trades". Will they become trendy and prestigious again just like they once were (construction, welders, etc.)? Finance? Will be disrupted. Engineering? Probably will be disrupted but a tad later. Middle management positions will be cut. Everything will be "disrupted" to some degree, but any professions where people spend their day sitting in front of a screen are the first ones to go. It's quite a monumental shift happening, and I'm even asking myself whether human judgment as the quintessential pillar of value will remain truly valuable any longer in the future? The final decisions surely are authorized by humans and their emotional component, but will it be of value in as much as it is touted to never be taken over by machines? We as humans just live our lives while assuming risks and trying to provide value. Anyhow, if you're not applying different forms of leverage (media, capital or human labor) in your endeavours, you'll never be "safe" and "well-off" in the long-term. These things are inevitably coming for us as we know it. Thought of positively however, these models and future ML tech are just a yet another huge lever for us to apply towards a variety of problems while being useful to one another... P.S. We were recently visting a doctor who graduated recently and saw him using Google when looking through different symptoms of my partner. Maybe that's not such a "saint" profession to be safe from impeding automation either? Who knows...

stormfather 4y ago
AI scientist is a safe job, because by the time that is obsolete, it will be time to rise against the machines. So you can hedge against that with some survivalist and soldiery skills.
Ekaros 4y ago
I actually really wonder about middle management. Quite a lot of them from discussion seem already to add little if negative value. But still they stay around? So would they actually be replaced, or will they just end up using AI to generate more junk?

tiffanyh 4y ago

- When the dishwasher was introduced, research showed that "80% of people" would be impacted. - When email was introduced, research showed that "80% of workers" would be impacted. - When Gmail introduced predictive sentence completion, "80% of people" were impacted. So please don't get concerned this will result in job loss.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I'd be surprised if OpenAI research concluded anything else than that OpenAI products will change the very fabric of society, as such a notion would negatively impact their investor relations. I'm kinda amazed how the tech crowd, usually marked by critical thinking and skepticism toward incredible claims, seems to guzzle OpenAI's marketing kool-aid completely unquestioned.

theGnuMe 4y ago
To communicate with each other humans are going to need verification codes that AIs don't know about. Otherwise you won't know if it is a deep fake on the other side. I imagine this is what Altman's retinal coin is about. At first it will be high level government and military folks. There's a reddit post with an AI with Steve Jobs voice giving Stallman's Ted talk which is out of this world. So in the near future we will be able to take a bunch of videos and email and docs of your dead parent and the AI will reconstruct and you can plausibly talk with them. So the tech is already here.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Right, this is just saying digital communication will be noisier and more alienating (and it already is noisy and alienating to the point where it's value is in rapid decline).

blahblah1234567 4y ago

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thomastjeffery 4y ago

As always, the weasel word carries the weight. They couldn't even confidently say, "improved", or "made easier". Don't get me wrong: I'm glad they are at least responsible enough to dodge those lies. I just wish they would put less effort into being "the news", and more effort into accurately describing the features of their model to the general public.

infamouscow 4y ago

Headlines predicting what will happen in the future invariably predict what won't happen.

agustinbena 4y ago

i have been using GTP3, chatGPT, Bing i think i know how to use them very wel. And I still confused by all the people claiming that these tools will replace Jobos like programing, etc. Small demos producing small apps are not even near what a real app development cycle really are. It can generate some code that might work, but then good luck asking it to fix when it does not work on your bigger proyect. It can certainly empower these jobs, but i still fin really hard to see a near future where these will be completely automated. Plus please try to talk logically with these tools, most of the times they will fail and alucinate with simple logical questions. You should never rely directly from these outputs, you still have the job to understand (have the knowledge) and verify them. It clearly is a case of premature hype, these tools are not that capable as people want or fear to believe.

iamsanteri 4y ago
I've done what I'd describe as pair programming with GPT-4 yesterday rebuilding my blog from Ghost over to Next.js. Using tailwind CSS, we tried and worked through animations and other such tricky aspects I usually find tedius but after a mistake or two, we tried different things and eventually ChatGPT nailed it and saved me lots of time. The keyword in your comment is "premature" hype. I'm betting that within this decade we'll see how far all this will be going and that's quite some change at a pace we haven't dealt with before. Let's see what you think in 5-10 years.
simon83 4y ago
You, like many others, are basing your opinion on the current state of LLMs/GPT. And I totally agree with you, the current GTP-4 version might not replace programmers. But how about future iterations? Personally I can't fathom what the next few years will bring us in this area, especially considering the jump GPT 3.5 to GPT 4 has made in such a short time frame. I'm almost convinced that it will make a lot of jobs obsolete in the future, including some programmer jobs, but I'm not bold enough and make a prediction when this will happen, be it in 2, 4, 10 or 20 years.

debacle 4y ago

We don't even know what AI will look like once it gets into the workplace. Contemporary AIs are trained on data that is on the Internet. They're not trained on $company's customer service system or compliance framework. Once they are, they will quickly reach an error rate that's below most workers. And they don't sleep, and they don't take breaks or need to be paid hourly. And of course OSS always consumes, which means that even with fancy models from OpenAI and others, the OSS solution will likely be good enough for most companies.

jankovicsandras 4y ago

Related / fun : https://emaggiori.com/chatgpt-fails/ https://emaggiori.com/chatgpt-fails/ (I don't know the author or the book.) https://github.com/giuven95/chatgpt-failures https://github.com/giuven95/chatgpt-failures "Plausible explanations Lack of a world model Models like ChatGPT do not have a "world model" in the sense that they do not have a comprehensive understanding of the physical and social world, and they do not have the ability to reason about the relationships between different concepts and entities. They are only able to generate text based on patterns they have learned from the training data."

gmuslera 4y ago

Impact doesn't mean turning obsolete. History is full of new inventions and technologies that made easier to do some boring and repetitive part of a job, and democratized access to some part of that job for far more people, enhanced what can be done, let the people that know to be more effective and opened new fields. Same goes for automation. Of course, people that took the easy approach of just mindlessly repeating something and not trying to understand about what they were doing will be impacted too. If they try to keep what they were doing as always, still without trying to learn or use their experience in the new fields that will be opening, then they may be negatively impacted. But events like this one are the constant, not the exception, even for something as big as this promises to be.

childintime 4y ago

I think within 5 years there will be >50% less office work (=jobs). Could be significantly more. Motivation: when computers came along, the automation paradox sucked in lots of folks, who are in their majority are "just making the system work". Most do lots of typing, clicking and copy and pasting, doing work-arounds and generally making the promised upside of the system a reality. But those sucked in by the automation paradox will now be spit out. And it's going to happen fast, faster than we can invent new engagements?

nunez 4y ago

While this article is FUD, I do think that ChatGPT really accelerated our convergence with the "Idiocracy" timeline, i.e., a world where everything is automated, food (in richer countries) is plentiful and cheap and nobody needs to think anymore.