OpenAI Executives Say AI Will Be Able to Do Any Job Within 10 Years

Artificial intelligence (AI) will be capable of doing any job a human can do within the next 10 years, according to two executives at OpenAI.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said AI will reach this stage — called “artificial general intelligence” or AGI — and change the nature of work, WSJ reported Monday (Oct. 23).

“We’re big believers that you give people better tools, and they do things that astonish you,” Altman said, per the report. “And I think AGI will be the best tool humanity has yet created.”

At the same time, the executives said the technology needs to be developed with caution, with builders addressing the potential downsides, mitigating the risks, sharing safety techniques with others, and ensuring the regulatory and societal infrastructure keeps pace with the technology.

“So, when you think about what are sort of the concrete safety measures along the way, No. 1 is actually rolling out the technology and slowly making contact with reality; understanding how it affects certain use cases and industries; and actually dealing with the implications of that,” Murati said, per the report.

Addressing the issue of publishers objecting to their content being used to train AI models, Altman said that the conversation about data will soon shift because as AI models get smarter and develop reasoning capacity, they will have less need of data for training.

Asked about the availability of tools that can detect if an image or text was generated by AI, Murati said OpenAI is testing technology that is almost 99% reliable in detecting AI-generated images. Detecting AI-generated text is a less straightforward problem, and the company is working on that.

On how AI will change the nature of work, Murati said it could increase inequality and it could boost productivity and creativity, but it is “certainly going to lead to a lot of disruption in the workforce.”

Altman added, per the report: “Every technological revolution affects the job market. I’m not afraid of that at all. In fact, I think that’s good, I think that’s the way of progress. And we’ll find new and better jobs.”

It was reported Thursday (Oct. 19) that OpenAI is mulling a share sale that would value the company at $86 billion — about triple what it was six months ago.

That news comes amid a wave of investment in the AI space that has been driven in part by the popularity of generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the Financial Times reported.