Widespread publicity: Microsoft’s stand at the Integrated Systems Europe audiovisual and systems integration exhibition in Barcelona. The American company invested US$10bil (RM42.3bil) in OpenAI just days after saying it would lay off 10,000 employees. — AFP
NEW YORK: Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems stand to threaten jobs primarily in the financial, legal and technology sectors, says the latest MLIV Pulse survey.
What’s more striking about the results is that more than two-thirds of the 292 respondents went on to say they didn’t view their own jobs as being at risk anytime soon, even though they work predominantly in the financial sector.
For decades, in some form or another, AI has been under development. But in recent months, a surge of interest in AI, most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E products, has sparked widespread excitement among investors who believe it could also generate massive financial rewards.
The MLIV Pulse survey participants were split almost evenly on whether these kinds of technologies were worth investing in. There was an evident lack of professional use of any kind of AI from the majority of investors, with only 12% saying they used one and just 27% saying they planned to.
More than half of all respondents said they aren’t even considering using AI to help them invest.
This contrasts starkly with recent rallies seen in the market for companies connected to advanced AI, in part fuelled by the widespread publicity of ChatGPT and Microsoft Corp’s US$10bil (RM42.5bil) investment in OpenAI, its developer.
Companies such as BuzzFeed Inc, C3.ai Inc, SoundHound AI Inc and BigBear.ai Holdings Inc are among the stocks that have all seen massive jumps in volume along with dizzying swings in their share prices.
Businesses and investors are in a race to become the go-to names for technology that can create media such as text and pictures from simple prompts or hold human-like conversations on a wide variety of topics, from whether a cat would win a fight with an eagle to practical considerations about world events or school projects.
Microsoft is up against the likes of Alphabet Inc, Meta Platforms Inc and Amazon.com Inc in working to offer the smartest AI tools to the greatest number of people.
The promise of tools like ChatGPT leaves room for some investors’ desires, and only 49% of respondents sais they planned to buy stocks with exposure to such generative AI tools.
Overall, about 41% of all respondents said they intended to increase exposure to tech stocks more broadly, while 38% said they’d hold steady over the next six months.
Even before the current wave of interest in AI, the question of whether smart automation will create more opportunities than it displaces has been a topic of great interest to workers and businesses alike.
In 2023, many of the companies making job cuts at unprecedented levels are also the ones investing billions in building out their AI capabilities.
In January, Alphabet announced 12,000 job cuts globally, but at the same time, chief executive officer Sundar Pichai singled out AI as a key investment area.
Similarly, Microsoft announced its US$10bil (RM42.3bil) investment in OpenAI just days after saying it would lay off 10,000 employees. Neither company is unique in this regard.
“There are very interesting AI wars coming up between the tech companies,” University of Southampton Professor of Computer Science Wendy Hall told Bloomberg TV. — Bloomberg
