Tesla, it’s him, Twitter, it’s him, SpaceX, it’s him. And yet Elon Musk failed to get his hands on the techno that exploded at the end of 2022. Generative AI, which now forces everyone to review their tools, their processes, even their profession, has escaped the voracious appetite of Elon Musk.
Worse, Elon Musk badly missed the mark. Because OpenAI was founded in 2015 by a few people including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who now leads the company. Faced with the race for computing power imposed by Google, and therefore the massive investment needs, Musk had in 2018 tried to take direct control of the company to run it himself. Without success. Musk then decided to resign to better focus on Tesla.
And now, following the release of ChatGPT-4, AI experts and researchers (including French people) are calling in a forum for a six-month moratorium. And Elon Musk is one of the signatories. The signatories report “major risks for humanity”. A moratorium which could make it possible to put in place security systems and new rules, for example to distinguish the real from the artificial.
300 million jobs that artificial intelligence could replace
The boss of OpenAI, Sam Altman, himself recently admitted to being “a little bit scared” by his creation which could be used for computer attacks or misinformation.
Still, Elon Musk is not the only authoritative signatory of the text. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, members of Google’s DeepMind AI lab, and Stability AI boss Emad Mostaque scribbled on the sheet. “The past few months have seen AI labs lock themselves in an uncontrolled race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital brains, which no one – not even their creators – can reliably understand, predict or control.” they.
It is in this context that the American bank Goldman Sachs has just published a document which estimates the number of jobs that artificial intelligence could replace at 300 million. That is about a quarter of global activity.
“If generative AI lives up to its promise, the labor market could experience significant disruption”
“If generative AI lives up to its promise, the labor market could experience significant disruption,” the investment bank said in a research note.
The American bank nevertheless assures that the artificial intelligence technology is a “major advance” since new jobs could also be created by the emergence of these models. According to the study, generative artificial intelligence could boost productivity by increasing global GDP by 7%.
In detail, 45% of administrative tasks and support functions could be performed by tools such as ChatGPT, Dall-E or Midjourney. But in the primary and secondary sectors too, automation and robotization are at work. The armed forces, or even agriculture and fishing would be hit hard by this transformation. The jobs least exposed to AI are cleaning and maintenance, installation and repair, and jobs in the construction industry, according to Goldman.
Citing a study that found 60% of the workforce in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940, Goldman Sachs predicts that a quarter of all tasks performed in Europe could be automated by AI.