Just three years after ChatGPT launched globally, it has disrupted industriesaccelerated scientific discoveryand gave rise to visions in which diseases are cured And work weeks are decreasing. Yet the same technology that fuels these promises also creates a host of new anxieties — and no one feels it more acutely than the man who helped unleash it.
CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman has just revealed that there’s a “long list of things” that haven’t been so great about ChatGPT’s rapid rise, starting with the speed at which it reshaped the world. The very system that could eradicate disease, he said Tonight’s showcan also be misused in ways that society is completely unprepared for.
“One of the things that worries me is the pace of change that’s happening in the world right now,” Altman said. Jimmy Fallon. “This is a three-year-old technology. No other technology has ever been adopted so quickly by the world.”
He added: “Making sure that we present this to the world in a responsible way, giving people time to adapt, to give feedback, to understand how to proceed, you could imagine we were wrong. »
But with more than 800 million people I now use ChatGPT every week, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Technology is now integrated into daily life, from classrooms to meeting rooms, often faster than the guardrails can keep up.
Fortune has contacted OpenAI for further comment.
Jobs might start changing ‘pretty quickly,’ but we’ll all find new jobs to do, says Altman
Altman’s comments come as he also worries about his competitors’ pace of change. The 40-year-old man would have declared “code red” last week to devote more resources to improving ChatGPT under pressure from Google and other AI rivals, including Meta and anthropogenic, is intensifying.
Together, companies’ AI efforts have driven historic productivity gains and new ways of gathering and analyzing information, but also deepened uncertainty about the future of work. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was particularly blunt, warning that A.I. could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
Altman, however, remains largely optimistic. Even if the employment disruption is rapid, it will be offset by entirely new types of work, he says.
“The rate at which jobs change could be quite rapid. I have no doubt that we will find all the new jobs to do and, I hope, much better jobs,” he added. Tonight’s show.
Some of these future roles he suggestedcould be literally out of this world.
“In 2035, that graduate student, if he’s still going to college, could very well be going on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in a completely new, exciting, super-well-paid, super-interesting job,” Altman told video journalist Cleo Abram earlier this year.
Space job growth is also an area of focus Google CEO Sundar Pichai is optimistic about— with possible expansion in just 10 years.
“One of our goals is how can we one day have data centers in space to better harness the energy of the sun, which is 100 trillion times more energy than we produce on the entire Earth today? Pichai said on Fox News late last month.
In five years, AI will cure diseases, predicts Altman
Despite all the uncertainty surrounding the impact of AI on employment, education and CompanyThere is one area in which technology leaders remain almost universally optimistic: medicine.
Amodei has said technology could lead to the elimination of most cancers, while Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates predicted “revolutionary treatments”. AI is already progressing accelerate drug discovery and help scientists analyze biological data on scales once thought impossible.
AI models could usher in an era of innovation to cure diseases as early as 2030, Altman added.
“Five years is a long time,” Altman said. “Next year, I hope we start seeing these models make small but important new scientific discoveries. And in five years, I hope they are curing diseases.”