In brief
- Microsoft’s AI CEO says AI will automate most white-collar jobs like lawyers and accountants in 12-18 months.
- The tech giant is building its own super intelligence foundation model for release sometime this year.
- Suleyman warns that a major AI safety incident is likely in the next two to three years with no regulatory mechanisms in place.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said most professional white-collar tasks could be fully automated within the next two years, outlining a timeline that would affect workers across industries, including law, accounting, and marketing.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Suleyman said AI is approaching what he described as “human-level performance” of most office-based roles.
“I think that we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks,” he said. “So white collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
He pointed to software engineering as an example of how roles are changing, saying that Microsoft software engineers reported using AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their coding work.
“So it’s a different relationship to the technology, and that’s happened in the last six months,” Suleyman said.
Suleyman said gains in computing power now allow AI models to outperform most programmers, a shift he said justifies heavy investment, including with ChatGPT developer OpenAI. In October, Microsoft extended its intellectual property agreement with OpenAI through 2032, retaining a $135 billion stake in the company.
Despite those eye-watering investments, Suleyman said Microsoft should develop AI products in-house to build resiliency and self-reliance.
“We have to develop our own foundation models, which are at the absolute frontier with gigawatt-scale compute with some of the very best AI training teams in the world,” he said. “That’s our true self-sufficiency mission.”
Suleyman said he envisions “professional-grade AGI”—a form of artificial general intelligence capable of performing most cognitive tasks humans can handle in the next two years.
Economists are also seeing the shift, saying that anyone who depends on a computer to do their job is already at risk.
“The jobs most exposed are those requiring higher education, paying more, and involving cognitive tasks,” Tobias Sytsma, economist with the Rand Corporation, previously told Decrypt. “Historically, this type of AI exposure has been correlated with employment reductions.”
Policymakers are increasingly grappling with how to prepare for the day when AI can fully replace human workers. Earlier this month, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said he would travel to California to discuss the technology.
“Artificial intelligence and robotics will transform the world. Today, a handful of billionaires in Silicon Valley are making decisions behind closed doors that will shape the future of humanity,” Sanders said in a statement. “Meanwhile, working people have no voice in these discussions, and far too little visibility into the rapid changes already underway.”
Suleyman’s comments echo those of other tech CEOs, including Vlad Tenev, who in January argued AI will fuel a surge of new jobs, solo companies, and industries, not just cause displacement.
“We’re on a curve of rapidly accelerating job creation, which I like to call the ‘job singularity,’ a Cambrian explosion of not just new jobs but new job families across every imaginable field,” Tenev said. “Where the internet gave people worldwide reach, AI gives them a world-class staff.”
Despite his view that AGI was on the horizon, Suleyman addressed safety concerns around increasingly autonomous systems.
“We should only bring a system like that into the world if we are sure we can control it and operate it in a subordinate way to us, so that humans remain at the top of the food chain and these tools are designed to enhance human well-being and serve humanity, not exceed humanity,” he said.
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