Govt goes big on AI

Tech like GPT will be huge for a couple of years and disappointingly, will affect the freelance writing community. It will only be short term though as sooner or later, the benefit of actual human input with passion or emotion will prevail. But, I do feel for the content-creating community. We look after a lot of them for their mortgages and insurance, I'm hoping we don't need to create an emergency plan. With any luck, AI will end up showing its weaknesses soon, and then the freelance humans can get stuck in to cover the void.

In the week that has seen the release of ChatGPT 4, the UK Government is right to provide funding for AI research. Many of us probably looked at some sci-fi in the past featuring AI and thought "that will never happen in my lifetime". Well it's time to wake up: it has. But, and it's a big but, ChatGPT and other AI tools remain just tools, they still require human input. Will they replace your job? Probably not, but could they take a lot of the boring/non-efficient tasks away? Most definitely yes. A point to bear in mind, based solely on words, an AI engine can reply to a job vacancy on Indeed (or other employment job board) and craft a reply with sufficient plus points that the candidate gets through to interview, with probably no more than 60 seconds of applicant input.

The third industrial revolution is already underway, and our government is only just waking up to it.

Creating a resilient tech sector requires access to finding and skills, both of which are in short supply. We have to compete with Berlin, Amsterdam and other cities for the best talent, and events over the last week with SVB have shown just how fragile the money behind tech is.

If the government is serious about creating an environment where the next unicorns can be born and thrive they will need to put tech at the heart of the economy.

And tech's impact on the economy cannot be understated. AI is coming for our jobs. AI will replace middle-income, middle-class jobs - the lawyer, the accountant, the marketer. And the impact of that on the economy can't be understated.

Innovation is key to securing the UK's future and AI is a highly disruptive and promising technology. The announcement of the AI sandbox launch sits within the Government's plan to secure Britain's place as a global science and technology superpower. Investment now will make a huge impact on the way we live our lives in the years to come. This should be something everyone can get behind, with the ultimate goals of improving productivity, maximising opportunities within the healthcare sector and finding ways to help our planet.

ChatGPT and the wide spin-off of tools using this technology need to be seen as an opportunity for those in many industries. The technology has the potential to speed up and assist existing processes, however, it is unlikely to put people out of jobs in the short to medium term. It's the right move for the government to provide funding for AI research as while the technology is emerging, there will be many use cases that are yet to be discovered. This technology is moving rapidly: the launch of GPT-4 this week proclaims to be more creative and less likely to invent facts. For example, GPT-4 is good enough that it is already being used by Stripe to help answer support questions from corporate users.