BiGS Actionable Intelligence:
BOSTON—Employees should expect the roles they are working in to change in the future as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more popular, said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the AI research and deployment company behind ChatGPT and DALL·E.
The shift in how employees will conduct their work will result in some people losing jobs, but they should be informed of the impact it will have on their role, Altman told the Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS) during a press conference at Harvard University on Wednesday.
The “shape of jobs will change,” he told BiGS, but employees can also benefit from using AI and machine learning as its use becomes more commonplace.
Altman’s comments will be closely watched in coming years as companies across industries evaluate and implement AI solutions in many different areas, from manufacturing to HR and other business functions. The impact of AI more broadly—for example, on the U.S. workforce—is also being monitored and studied.
The impact on low-wage, low-skill workers, which could be an immediate consequence of AI systems, is of particular interest in Washington DC and beyond.
“It is important to be upfront with people that these impacts might happen,” Altman said. “People can go on to far greater heights using these tools.”
Government Impact on AI
The government should be proactive and work with industries on how these changes will impact the workforce and what skill sets people will need in the future, Altman said.
“One of the most important things to figure out is how government can help play a role,” he said. “This is an interesting first step to get people from industry talking with people from government.”
While AI has already been adopted in many industries, and as machine learning matures, its impact to how business is conducted will be immense, Altman said.
“Given the magnitude of economic change, how we think about the illusion of the social contract … [and] how people like the balance between capital and labor, that’s going to require serious societal debate,” Altman said. “This is the main reason our strategy of iterative deployment is so important— gives us time to debate those questions.”
Altman was the president of the early-stage startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab with a mission to build general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits society broadly. The company remains governed by the nonprofit today.
Altman is the recipient of the 2024 Xfund Experiment Cup. The award is handed out by Xfund to extraordinary founders from the world’s best universities and is co-hosted by Harvard Business School's Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS); the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS); and the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard.