Paris, May 26 (AFP/APP): The boss of OpenAI, the firm behind the massively popular ChatGPT bot, said on Friday that his firm’s technology would not destroy the job market as he sought to calm fears about the march of artificial intelligence (AI).
Sam Altman, on a global tour to charm national leaders and powerbrokers, said in Paris that AI would not — as some have warned — wipe out whole sectors of the workforce through automation.
“This idea that AI is going to progress to a point where humans don’t have any work to do or don’t have any purpose has never resonated with me,” he said.
Asked about the media industry, where several outlets already use AI to generate stories, Altman said ChatGPT should instead be like giving a journalist 100 assistants to help them research and come up with ideas.
ChatGPT burst into the spotlight late last year, demonstrating an ability to generate essays, poems and conversations from the briefest of prompts.
Microsoft later laid out billions of dollars to support OpenAI and now uses the firm’s technology in several of its products — sparking a race with Google, which has made a slew of similar announcements.
Altman, a 38-year-old emerging star of Silicon Valley, has received rapturous welcomes from leaders everywhere from Lagos to London.
Though earlier this week, he seemed to annoy the European Union by hinting that his firm could leave the bloc if they regulate too severely.
He insisted to a group of journalists on the sidelines of the Paris event that the headlines were not fair and he had no intention of leaving the bloc — rather, OpenAI was likely to open an office in Europe in the future.
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