Americans don’t think ChatGPT and its rivals will have a big impact on their work. Big A.I. thinks otherwise

That’s not to say people who have heard of OpenAI’s large language model don’t think it will have an impact—the research, conducted in late July, shows more than half of them see big changes coming for software engineers, graphic designers, and <covers eyes> journalists. They just don’t tend to think they’ll be so heavily affected themselves anytime soon, with 36% predicting a minor impact in the next couple decades, and 27% foreseeing no impact at all.

These people may or may not be right, but there’s certainly no lull in the push to insert chatbots into everyday work life. OpenAI yesterday announced ChatGPT Enterprise, putting itself into competition with the swelling portfolio of ChatGPT-based enterprise offerings of the company’s big partner/patron, Microsoft.

The benefits over standard ChatGPT are debatable—the most notable difference seems to be that ChatGPT Enterprise defaults away from allowing the model to use conversations as training fodder—but nonetheless, OpenAI claims business leaders are clamoring to use the chatbot, with over 80% of Fortune 500 companies already adopting it to some degree.

Google also announced a host of new enterprise A.I. features at its Cloud Next event today, citing benefits for big customers like L’Oréal and GM. The announcements affect everything from Meet and Chat to Gmail and Docs, so that’s surely going to have a significant impact on a lot of workers.

Meanwhile, Pew also reported yesterday that Americans are increasingly more concerned than excited about A.I.’s growing role in daily life. Last December, 38% said they felt that way—pretty much in line with the year before—but in a survey conducted in late July and early August, the proportion had risen to 52%.

As I wrote before, regarding a Reuters/Ipsos survey a few months back, one can expect A.I. fears to grow when experts keep saying how dangerous the technology is. But that doesn’t mean such fears should be discounted, and the details in Pew’s research are interesting—respondents tended to feel more positive than negative about A.I.’s role in product and service recommendations, tracking personal health, and making vehicles safer, but they’re really fretting about A.I.’s privacy impact.

Lawmakers are sensitive to these concerns, and Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer just announced a series of congressional “A.I. insight forums” that are supposed to inform future regulations. The first is scheduled for Sept. 13, and it promises to be quite an event, featuring Tesla/X.ai’s Elon Musk, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, plus civil rights and labor and creative-industries folks—and also Eric Schmidt, the military-industrial complex cheerleader and former Google CEO.

Sadly, this star-studded affair will take place behind closed doors, but I’m sure it will make a heck of a movie one day—it’s even expected to last for two to three hours, so the production could be a real-time nailbiter. More news below.

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David Meyer

NEWSWORTHY

Musk goes for a spin. Elon Musk hopped in the front seat of a Tesla and used X’s streaming feature to show off a beta version of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software (which, to reiterate for the millionth time, is not a factual description of its capabilities). Per The Verge, he had to stop the car from running a red light, violated Tesla’s own rules by livestreaming from the driver’s seat, and prominently displayed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s home address.

Kiwi tech tax. New Zealand will from 2025 roll out a unilateral digital services tax on the likes of Apple and Amazon, after countries that have already legislated for such taxes last month agreed to delay their implementation. “While we will keep working to support a multilateral agreement, we are not prepared to simply wait around until then to find out,” said Finance Minister Grant Robertson in a statement quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

Meta news ban. The Canadian government may still be furious about Meta’s decision to block news links in the country, but nearly a month on, there’s no appreciable impact on Canadian Facebook use. The company took the decision in protest against a law that would force it to pay news organizations for sending traffic to their websites. According to Reuters, the lack of impact on usage seems to support Meta’s claim that news is of little value to it.

ON OUR FEED

“It's probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.”

—Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, referring to employees who resist returning to the office three days a week, while speaking at a company “fishbowl” meeting. According to Insider, Jassy declined to cite any data that might back up his push for strict limits on remote work.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Exclusive: Peter Thiel explains his decision not to fund any presidential candidates in 2024, by Jessica Mathews

In a first, the SEC says NFTs sold by an L.A.-based entertainment firm are securities. Here’s how that could ripple throughout the industry, by Leo Schwarz

Binance says intel shared with authorities led to capture of senior ISIS members in Asia, by Jeff John Roberts

Software CEO worth almost $12 billion says he goes into the office ‘about once a quarter,’ bucking the return to office trend in Big Tech, by Nicholas Gordon

The A.I. revolution will also be a gender revolution as disruption revaluates women’s skills, by Grace Lordan

How an only-in-California law could allow one Uber driver to singlehandedly upend the gig economy, by David Astoria and Seth Finberg

BEFORE YOU GO

YouTube sends naughty creators back to school. In what feels a bit like the creator industry’s equivalent of a court-ordered driving safety course, YouTube has introduced a new “educational training course” (also known as “a course”) for creators who are caught breaking the platform’s rules and aren’t quite sure why. YouTube will lift warnings from the channels of those who complete the course and don’t violate the same policy for 90 days.

“Creators have told us they want more resources to better understand how we draw our policy lines,” YouTube said in a blog post. “We also know receiving a strike can be disruptive to a creator’s posting schedule, and for the creators building businesses through our YouTube Partner Program, receiving an unintentional strike is not only frustrating, but can financially impact their bottom line.”