The Neuron
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😺 Will AI take your job?

😺 Will AI take your job?

PLUS: the 5 tools companies are using to build AI

Pete Huang & Noah Edelman
November 15, 2023

Welcome, humans.

Today, we're diving deep into the numbers, so dust off those old TI-84 calculators from '07—the ones you preloaded with formulas for those in-class math tests!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Most people are using AI at work, but companies are still experimenting.
77% of companies have started adopting AI.
AirBnB paid $200M for a startup to boost its AI efforts.
YouTube will disclose videos that include synthetic content.

Will AI take your job?! It’s not a simple yes/no…

Financial Times

Will AI take your job?

The Neuron's answer might be less satisfying than a simple 'yes' or 'no': it really depends.

It depends first on what your job is. AI in its current form excels at individual tasks. A Retool survey of >1,500 tech workers revealed that 88% of them are leveraging AI for:

code/query assistance (48%).
copywriting (33%).
debugging (32%).
data analysis (30%).

The good news is that most roles are more about workflows—engineers write code AND analyze data AND write emails.

So far, AI has mostly boosted productivity for white-collar workers, rather than forcing them to update their LinkedIn bios to “open for work”.

But some jobs are more single-task roles.

One study found that right after ChatGPT launched, there was a decrease in freelance writing gigs AND their pay rate.

And yes—AI will be only able to do more white-collar jobs over time. But, AI doing more of our jobs ≠ widespread job loss.

A little historical context...

In 1900, 36% of the US employed population worked in agriculture. Today, that number is 1.2%, and unemployment is <4%.

Why it matters: Yes, AI will take jobs, but it’ll also create new ones. The best thing you can do today is learn how to work closely with AI in your field. (case in point: 63% of tech employers now favor folks who can code with AI rather than just knowing how to code).

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You're not alone in your AI concerns–businesses are right there with you.

Retool found that while 77% of companies have started adopting AI, most are still in the early stages.

One reason is companies don’t actually know what to use AI for—35% of companies are entering AI to “keep up with trends” and 31% to “keep up with competitors”.

Talk about some serious FOMO!

For the ones who do know what to use it for, it’s sorta the same stuff we’ve been hearing: in-product features (30%), customer support (26%), Q&A chatbots (26%), etc.

And those companies are grappling with challenges like AI accuracy (cited by 39%), data security concerns (33%), and cost issues (28%).

It’s giving gold rush vibes: everyone’s panning for gold in the same rivers, but some days feel rocky.

The front-runners in AI integration are mostly using OpenAI’s hosted models, like GPT-4. A small minority are taking the plunge into more custom models with tools like:

Hugging Face (26%).
LangChain (18%).
AWS Bedrock (12%).
LlamaIndex (8%).
Weights & Biases (8%).

Around the Horn.

The recent evaluation ranking models on their hallucinations seemed to have its own flaws.
A Chinese AI startup called 01.AI reached unicorn status in <8 months and outperforms Llama on some metrics.
YouTube updated its AI policies to include discloses for “altered or synthetic content”.
A team made OpenAI’s speech recognition model “Whisper” 6x faster.