AInisights: AI is Coming for Jobs, Robots are Here to Help, AGI is on the Horizon, Google has a Formidable Competitor

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AInsights: Generative insights in AI. This series rapid fire series offers executive level AInsights into the rapidly shifting landscape of generative AI. 
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says artificial general intelligence is on the horizon but will change the world much less than we fear.
Rumor is that Sam Altman was fired as CEO by the board over concerns in how Altman was aggressively pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI). Now Altman is on record saying that our concerns over AGI may be overblown.
“People are begging to be disappointed and they will be,” said Altman.
AGI is next-level artificial intelligence that can complete tasks on par with or better than humans.
Altman believes that AGI will become an “incredible tool for productivity.”
“It will change the world much less than we all think and it will change jobs much less than we all think,” Altman assured

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Make no mistake. The stakes will only get higher. They already are with the arrival of generative AI.
In a conversation with Satya Nadella, Altman reminded us that there is no “magic red button” to stop AI.
But at the same time, we as humans are already evolving by using AI and we will continue to do so.
“The world had a two week freakout over ChatGPT 4. ‘This changes everything. AGI is coming tomorrow. There are no jobs by the end of the year.’ And now people are like, ‘why is it so slow!?’,” Altman joked with the Economist.
While he is aiming to downplay the role of AGI, generative AI is already showing us what we can expect. We need a new era of AI-first leadership. We need decision-makers who can not only automate work but also imagine, inspire, and empower a renaissance, one where workers and jobs are augmented with AI to unlock new potential and performance.

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman warns AI is a ‘fundamentally labor replacing’ tool over  the long term.

A session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, said the quiet part out loud, AI is coming for jobs. I feel like this is more than just a bullet in this AInisights update. This is a canary in the coal mine if that’s still a relevant reference point.
In an interview with CNBC, Suleyman was asked by if Ai was going to replace humans in the workplace.
This was his answer, “I think in the long term—over many decades—we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools because, left completely to the market…these are fundamentally labor replacing tools.”
And he’s right. Let’s get that part out of the way.
Left to their own devices, executives naturally gravitate toward what they know, automation and cost-cutting to increase margins and profitability. You have to center insights on what drives their KPIs.

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Suleyman is not saying this from a doomsday perspective. He’s asking us to think differently about how we use AI to augment our work, and more importantly, our thinking…
In reality, executives have never, we’ve never, had access to technology that can collaborate and create. We’ve always been the source of creation. Executive decision-making is what drives businesses. At most, digital transformation, predictive analytics, have aided in decision-making. But now, AI can now augment decision-making, perform work, make us smarter and more capable, and unlock new possibilities.
That takes a new vision and a new set of KPIs to attach to executive decision-making.
For example, IKEA launched an AI bot named Billie to lead first level contact with customers, effectively managing 47% of customer queries directed to the call centers.. In a time when everyone is talking about AI replacing jobs, IKEA trained 8,500 call center workers to serve as interior design advisers, generating 1.3 billion euros in one year.
Stanford AI and Robotics debut developmental robot that makes the Jetsons a reality.
Zipping Fu, Stanford & Robotics PhD at Stansford AI Lab, shared his team’s incredible project, Mobile ALOHA. The team includes Tony Zhao and Chelsea Finn.
If you ever watched the Jetsons, then you, like me, wished that we’d see Rosey come to life one day. And from an R&D perspective, that’s exactly what’s happening in Silicon Valley .
The advanced project and how they’re training Mobile ALOHA:
Imitation learning from human demonstrations has shown impressive performance in robotics. However, most results focus on table-top manipulation, lacking the mobility and dexterity necessary for generally useful tasks. In this work, we develop a system for imitating mobile manipulation tasks that are bimanual and require whole-body control. We first present Mobile ALOHA, a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection.
To date, their testing now includes 50 autonomous demos to accomplish complex mobile manipulation tasks.
Tasks include laundry, self-charging, vacuuming, watering plants, loading and unloading a dishwasher, making coffee, cooking , getting drinks from a refrigerator, opening a beer, opening doors, playing with pets, doing laundry, and so much more.
https://twitter.com/zipengfu/status/1742973258528612724

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