AI is changing the world faster than most realize

The people building AI are saying — subtly and unsubtly — that the technology is advancing more rapidly than the vast majority of people realize.Why it matters: It’s likely we won't know how and how much AI will change the way we live, work and play until it already has."The internet was a minor breeze compared to the huge storms that will hit us," says Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia. "If this technology develops at the pace the lab leaders are predicting, we are utterly unprepared."Zoom in: Pay attention to what the people closest to the technology are saying.“[T]he 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before. We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a recent blog post.Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, told Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "godfathers of AI," told BBC Radio 4 the technology is moving "very, very fast, much faster than I expected."Case in point: Take ChatGPT. It took five days after launch for the chatbot to hit 1 million users.It took Facebook 10 months to get to 1 million users, and it took Twitter, now X, two years to hit the same milestone.Between the lines: Despite those forecasts, few appear to be taking the AI tsunami seriously enough."In the face of ginormous uncertainty, one of the most common reactions is to wait and see," Korinek, who sits on Anthropic's Economic Advisory Council, an unpaid position, says. "That's a pretty hazardous approach.""This is a very speculative technology, and the systems we have now are clearly subhuman in a number of areas," he says. "But we’ve seen them improve rapidly in the past couple of years. So if you extrapolate, it seems like these systems could have superhuman intelligence in the next few years."There are already signs that change is coming — fast. CEOs are starting to say "the quiet part out loud” when it comes to how AI will hit employment, The Wall Street Journal reports.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees he expects the tech giant’s workforce to shrink.Ford CEO Jim Farley said at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees that before requesting to open a new role for hiring, they must first prove that the job cannot be done using AI.The majority of U.S. managers recently surveyed by Resume Builder say they're using AI at work. Many are using it to make hiring, firing and promotion decisions, Axios' Megan Morrone reports.Even more people could be supervised by AI as the technology replaces more and more middle managers.It’s not just at work — teachers and professors across America are overwhelmed by AI’s march into the classroom.Generative AI is fueling a cheating surge, but there’s no consensus on how to stop it. Banning the technology isn't a great solution, as students need to learn how to use it effectively and safely before they graduate.A January 2023 survey, just two months after ChatGPT's launch, found that nearly 90% of college students had already used it for assignments, New York Magazine reports.Reality check: The prediction that AI will upend society is still just a prediction. Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist and another "godfather of AI," posted on X in February, "A house cat has way more common sense and understanding of the world than any LLM."CEOs have a vested interest in making bold claims about AI and its impact. It's a signal to investors and Wall Street that they're leading tech's next wave, Axios' Emily Peck reports.Still, even if AI froze in place right now — which would be next to impossible — its capabilities are already advanced enough to shake up our jobs and lives.What to watch: Amid fears of vanishing jobs and failing schools, there's still a case for optimism. Humans have adapted to technological change for centuries and could do it again."We could derive enormous productivity gains. Our economy could produce so much more," UVA's Korinek says. "This technology has the potential to lead to much more broadly shared prosperity. That’s what we should aim for."

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