Artificial Intelligence May Eliminate Some Jobs, OpenAI Executive Says
Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, at a Wall Street Journal event in Cannes, France, on Monday. Photo: John Scrivener for The Wall Street Journal By Stu Woo June 19, 2023 10:25 am ET An executive at a leading artificial-intelligence company has said what many people fear: While its technology may create new jobs, it will likely eliminate some too. “Every large company has an army of people that read and review contracts for revenue recognition purposes, for example,” said Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, at a Wall Street Journal event in Cannes, France. “You may not have that job. That may not be a job of the future.” As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, AI innovators including OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, have b
Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, at a Wall Street Journal event in Cannes, France, on Monday.
Photo: John Scrivener for The Wall Street Journal
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An executive at a leading artificial-intelligence company has said what many people fear: While its technology may create new jobs, it will likely eliminate some too.
“Every large company has an army of people that read and review contracts for revenue recognition purposes, for example,” said Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, at a Wall Street Journal event in Cannes, France. “You may not have that job. That may not be a job of the future.”
As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, AI innovators including OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, have been trying to walk a fine line on the impact of their technology on jobs and workers. On one hand, AI may “entirely automate some jobs,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman told Congress earlier this year.
Speaking at a Journal event at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday, Lightcap said AI could potentially create some jobs as well as eliminate others.
He said, for example, that a company that uses AI to double the amount of computer code it writes will need more employees for other things. “There’s more people that need to be brought in to do product design,” Lightcap said. “There’s more people that need to be brought in to do distribution and operations, and sales and marketing.”
Meanwhile, other workers will become more productive as they reclaim an hour a day, for example, by delegating grunt work to AI, Lightcap said. “This kind of productivity explosion, I think, is the thing we kind of see happening in reality,” he said.
Lightcap added that while AI models are good at jobs, they need to be told what tasks they should be doing, and their work must be checked and verified. “People will become more orchestrators,” he said.
As for the legions of lawyers and accountants who review contracts, Lightcap said he wasn’t too worried about their careers.
“The economy is pretty dynamic, and the folks that are doing that type of work are generally pretty smart and observant, and I think we’ll just find other things to do,” he said.
Write to Stu Woo at [email protected]
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