What is the big AI announcement happening this month?
OpenAI is reportedly set to announce an AI breakthrough in the coming weeks—AI that can do Ph.D.-level tasks, potentially replacing complex human work, Axios reported on Sunday. CEO Sam Altman has scheduled a closed-door briefing with the U.S. government in Washington D.C. on January 30, according to the report.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, revealed earlier this month that Meta is working on an AI, likely to arrive this year, that can replace mid-level engineers at the company.
“Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan.
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In the interview, Zuckerberg said Meta is working towards the moment when “a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers.”
Mark Zuckerberg. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Is AI Replacing Tech Jobs?
Meta also announced earlier this month, in a note written by Zuckerberg and obtained by Bloomberg, that it would be cutting about 5% of its 72,000-person staff. However, AI won’t be replacing those roles just yet. Zuckerberg said Meta intends to backfill the roles affected in 2025 or hire new employees to fill the vacancies left by those let go by the end of the year.
Related: ‘Going to Be an Intense Year’: Meta Is Laying Off More Than 3,000 as CEO Mark Zuckerberg Calls for ‘Extensive Performance-Based Cuts’ — Read the Memo
Still, Meta isn’t the first Big Tech company to tout AI’s coding capabilities. On an October earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that more than a quarter of all new code at Google is “generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by our engineers.”
“This helps our engineers do more and move faster,” Pichai said.
And it’s not just tech — banks are using AI to replace human work too. In March, JPMorgan Chase claimed that its free cash flow intelligence AI tool helped cut manual human work by 90%. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon stated in July that AI would eliminate jobs at the bank, especially in the customer service department, but would add jobs too.
According to a June survey conducted by Duke University and the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond, more than 60% of large U.S. companies plan to use AI within a year to take over tasks previously completed by human workers.
