Finance Association, May 30 (Editor Liu Rui) When OpenAI first released ChatGPT at the end of 2022, it sparked a wave of discussion: many people cheered that artificial intelligence would increase productivity and create new jobs, but at the same time, many people also feared that it might take away some jobs.

Nearly 18 months later, we'll find that the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy doesn't seem that significant: although major companies have begun to participate in the artificial intelligence boom, and artificial intelligence has indeed led to some layoffs, we haven't seen that jobs in a certain industry can be completely replaced by artificial intelligence, and the effects of artificial intelligence on increasing productivity are still unclear.

Earlier this year, Federal Reserve Chairman Powell said that generative artificial intelligence can boost productivity growth, but “probably not in the short term.” Meanwhile, two executives from OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence company, recently expressed similar views.

The economic impact of AI is just beginning

From May 29th to 31st, the Asian Science and Technology Conference was held in Singapore. On Thursday, Mira Murati (Mira Murati), the chief technology officer of OpenAI and known as the “mother of ChatGPT,” attended the conference remotely via video.

Speaking at the conference, she said that generative artificial intelligence is only beginning to have an impact on the economy.

She said, “We haven't realized the impact of it (artificial intelligence) on business and work because it's only just getting started... but what we've seen so far is that in a very short period of time, these artificial intelligence systems have entered the labor market as collaborators.”

This statement echoes OpenAI's Chief Operating Officer (COO) Brad Lightcap (Brad Lightcap). Earlier this month, Lightguy also said that it is still too early to draw conclusions about the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy.

Lightguy said he is “currently quite confident that GPT-4 level technology will be popularized and have a broad impact on the economy within 10 to 20 years.” This also means that its early economic impact was relatively small.

There is a need to promote the further spread of AI

Mulati believes that in order to further influence artificial intelligence on the global economy, it is necessary to promote its spread around the world.

Earlier this month, OpenAI made a big announcement of the GPT-4O chatbot. This new product has been hailed by Murati as the future of human-machine interaction. She believes it will promote the further spread of artificial intelligence technology.

Murati said that the GPT-4o model already helps users generate content such as text, presentations, and videos, and is becoming more and more intuitive to use, which is driving the further spread of artificial intelligence. She also mentioned that more and more people are already using artificial intelligence tools to complete tasks such as coding, writing, and administration.

“We may overestimate the impact of this technology in the short term, and maybe we'll be disappointed in a year or two,” Clement DeLange, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Hugging Face (Hug Face), recently said. “But we may also underestimate the long-term impact of artificial intelligence within 10 years. The world will eventually be very different.”

Currently, OpenAI is facing competition from many competitors such as Google under Alphabet Inc., Facebook parent company Meta, startup company Anthropic, and Musk's XAI.

Muratti said, “Currently, the development of artificial intelligence is very competitive. Competition is actually a good thing, as long as it's a competition where safety is the highest standard, and competitors don't take shortcuts and choose ramps.”