OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT “will eliminate a lot of jobs” in an interview with Lex Fridman on the latter’s eponymous podcast published Saturday.
Altman predicts that ‘customer service’ will be a sector that will be heavily impacted by ChatGPT’s continued development and adoption for businesses.
Below, partial transcription
FRIDMAN: For what jobs do you think the GPT language model outperforms humans?
Altman: Like perfection, making everything better end-to-end. Probably ten times more productive.
Friedman: Both are good questions.I Because if I were 10 times more productive, I would need far fewer programmers in the world, wouldn’t I?
ALTMAN: I think the world will discover that if you can get 10 times more code for the same price, you can use more code.
Friedman: So write more code
Altman: More code.
FRIDMAN: Is it true that more can be digitized? More can have more code.
Altman: I think we have a supply problem. yes.
FRIDMAN: So in terms of actually replacing jobs, is that a concern for you?
Altman: Yes. I’m trying to come up with a big category that I think could have a big impact. I think customer service is a category that can get less work done relatively quickly. I wasn’t sure about it, but I could believe it.
Altman adds:OS”
Fridman later asked Altman about being corrupted by power given his position as CEO of OpenAI as ChatGPT grows in capacity and ubiquity.
Partial transcription:
FRIDMAN: It might make you and a handful of people tHe is the most powerful human being on earth. Are you afraid that power will corrupt you?
Altman: Certainly. Look, I think you want decisions about this technology — and certainly decisions about who is running this technology also need to become more and more democratic over time.
I’m still not quite sure how to do this, but part of the reason I deploy [ChatGPT] This is to give the world time to adapt, reflect, think about this, get our institutions to pass regulations and come up with new norms for people to work together.
Altman said he did not want full control over OpenAI and its products, including ChatGPT.
“I think any version of ‘one person is controlling this’ is really bad,” he said. “I don’t have—and I don’t want super voting power.With OpenAI, you can’t control the board or anything like that. ”
Follow Robert Kratick on Twitter @rkraychik.
