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A.I. will make people more effective not displace them, says Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez

It’s early days in the rise of generative AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and many in the market remain unconvinced of how it will play out for the economy and society, if amazed at its tricks.

Warren Buffett said in a recent interview with Becky Quick on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that while ChatGPT did “wonderful things” writing a song for him in Spanish, and that “it’s an incredible technological advance in terms of showing what we can do,” he wasn’t convinced about the ultimate outcomes for the world. “I think this is extraordinary but I don’t know if it’s beneficial,” he said.

He did say the time-saving component of the tech is among the things that struck him.

“It can tell you that it’s read every book, every legal opinion. I mean, the amount of time it could save you, if you were doing all kinds of things, is unbelievable,” Buffett said.

That’s where CEOs in the generative AI space are focused.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in an interview after being named the No. 1 company on the 2023 CNBC Disruptor list this year that the legal profession is a good example.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the ChatGPT boom: 'We need regulation'

“What we’re hearing from customers using our API for legal companies is that it is totally transforming the way they work and the efficiency that any one lawyer can achieve and the accuracy, freeing people up to do more of what they do really well, and having this new tool to sort of give them as much leverage as possible,” Altman said.

That backs up what tech executives working directly with legal firms have previously told CNBC, with one saying of his legal and accounting firm clients that the sentiment right now is not that AI replaces lawyers, but “lawyers using AI are gonna replace lawyers. … Those professionals are going to be more effective, more efficient, they’ll be able to do more,” he said.

“That is a pattern we’re seeing again and again in many industries, and I’m super excited about it,” Altman said. “I do think it will touch almost everything.”

More coverage of the 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50

There isn’t much research yet to support these contentions, but early data does support the anecdotal evidence. A study released by MIT researchers in March showed that workers were 37% more efficient using ChatGPT.

Aidan Gomez, CEO of generative AI startup Cohere, which ranked No. 44 on this year’s Disruptor 50 list, pointed to that MIT study in a CNBC interview on Tuesday, saying, “The results are amazing,” he said. “That’s Industrial Revolution-level large. What the steam engine did for mechanical work, mechanical labor, this technology is going to do for intellectual labor.” 

Gomez stressed in his comments to CNBC that the research had not yet been peer-reviewed. The authors of the MIT research, Whitney Zhang and Shakked Noy, were unable to comment due to the research currently being in the process of submission to a journal for peer review and publication.

Generative AI already begun to ‘noticeably impact workers’

Cohere’s platform lets developers and businesses of all sizes — even those without expertise in machine learning — integrate AI features like copywriting, search, conversational AI, summarization or content moderation in their company’s mobile app or service platform. Cohere works with AI customer service tech vendor LivePerson and has cloud deals with Google, Amazon Web Services and Oracle. Salesforce is an investor in the company, one of the first investments the customer relationship management tech giant made this year in a new AI fund. Gomez, along with co-founder Nick Frosst, came from Google Brain, an exploratory deep learning artificial intelligence team that’s now part of Google Research. While at Alphabet‘s Google, Gomez and other researchers helped to develop a new method of natural language processing — transformers — that enable systems to grasp a word’s context more accurately.

Comments like Gomez’s have contributed to the debate about whether AI replaces human labor or augments it. In sectors such as education, those fears are already running high. Gomez, in keeping with the outlook from most AI executives, is sticking to the “augmentative” script.

“What you’re going to see is humans are going to become ten times more effective at what they do,” he said.

He did say we should be wary of companies pointing to AI as the reason for layoffs in the future. He expects that excuse to be made.

But workers also have an advantage, for now, Gomez said: the time it will take to integrate AI technology into the existing technology stack.

“The reality is this will be a slow process over the next half-decade and there will be time to adjust, and change your own job,” he said. “And frankly, you’re going to love it.”

His comments made clear that workers better get used to it.

“We’re pre the real deployment, so I think simmering underneath the water is all this work going on to just transform every product, every single company.”

The MIT study provided more of a mixed assessment of the eventual outcomes for workers and the labor market. The increases in productivity among college-educated professionals performing mid-level professional writing tasks were qualified as “substantial,” and the study showed these workers executed tasks “significantly faster.” Initially low-performing workers, meanwhile, saw output increase and time on task decrease. But the MIT researchers weren’t sure that meant the outlook was good for preserving jobs.

“The experimental evidence suggests that ChatGPT largely substitutes for worker effort rather than complementing workers’ skills, potentially causing a decrease in demand for workers, with adverse distributional effects as capital owners gain at the expense of workers,” they wrote.

The researchers also pointed to limitations in their study. For one, the tasks were “relatively short, self-contained, and lack a dimension of context-specific knowledge, which may inflate our estimates of ChatGPT’s usefulness.” They could not draw conclusions about overall job satisfaction from the results, and, in capturing “only direct, immediate effects of ChatGPT on the selected occupations” they cannot account for many other factors that will weigh in labor markets and production systems as they adapt to new technologies like ChatGPT, or how AI will influence each occupation, task, and skill level. 

The only conclusion they made with confidence in their paper: “For now, the evidence we provide suggests that generative AI technologies will — and have already begun — to noticeably impact workers.”

Watch the full CNBC Disruptor 50 interview above for more of this leading generative AI CEO’s views on how the next few years of work will play out.

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Inside a Utah desert facility preparing humans for life on Mars

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Inside a Utah desert facility preparing humans for life on Mars

Hidden among the majestic canyons of the Utah desert, about 7 miles from the nearest town, is a small research facility meant to prepare humans for life on Mars.

The Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that runs the Mars Desert Research Station, or MDRS, invited CNBC to shadow one of its analog crews on a recent mission.

MDRS is the best analog astronaut environment,” said Urban Koi, who served as health and safety officer for Crew 315. “The terrain is extremely similar to the Mars terrain and the protocols, research, science and engineering that occurs here is very similar to what we would do if we were to travel to Mars.”

SpaceX CEO and Mars advocate Elon Musk has said his company can get humans to Mars as early as 2029.

The 5-person Crew 315 spent two weeks living at the research station following the same procedures that they would on Mars.

David Laude, who served as the crew’s commander, described a typical day.

“So we all gather around by 7 a.m. around a common table in the upper deck and we have breakfast,” he said. “Around 8:00 we have our first meeting of the day where we plan out the day. And then in the morning, we usually have an EVA of two or three people and usually another one in the afternoon.”

An EVA refers to extravehicular activity. In NASA speak, EVAs refer to spacewalks, when astronauts leave the pressurized space station and must wear spacesuits to survive in space.

“I think the most challenging thing about these analog missions is just getting into a rhythm. … Although here the risk is lower, on Mars performing those daily tasks are what keeps us alive,” said Michael Andrews, the engineer for Crew 315.

Watch the video to find out more.

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Apple scores big victory with ‘F1,’ but AI is still a major problem in Cupertino

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Apple scores big victory with 'F1,' but AI is still a major problem in Cupertino

Formula One F1 – United States Grand Prix – Circuit of the Americas, Austin, Texas, U.S. – October 23, 2022 Tim Cook waves the chequered flag to the race winner Red Bull’s Max Verstappen 

Mike Segar | Reuters

Apple had two major launches last month. They couldn’t have been more different.

First, Apple revealed some of the artificial intelligence advancements it had been working on in the past year when it released developer versions of its operating systems to muted applause at its annual developer’s conference, WWDC. Then, at the end of the month, Apple hit the red carpet as its first true blockbuster movie, “F1,” debuted to over $155 million — and glowing reviews — in its first weekend.

While “F1” was a victory lap for Apple, highlighting the strength of its long-term outlook, the growth of its services business and its ability to tap into culture, Wall Street’s reaction to the company’s AI announcements at WWDC suggest there’s some trouble underneath the hood.

“F1” showed Apple at its best — in particular, its ability to invest in new, long-term projects. When Apple TV+ launched in 2019, it had only a handful of original shows and one movie, a film festival darling called “Hala” that didn’t even share its box office revenue.

Despite Apple TV+ being written off as a costly side-project, Apple stuck with its plan over the years, expanding its staff and operation in Culver City, California. That allowed the company to build up Hollywood connections, especially for TV shows, and build an entertainment track record. Now, an Apple Original can lead the box office on a summer weekend, the prime season for blockbuster films.

The success of “F1” also highlights Apple’s significant marketing machine and ability to get big-name talent to appear with its leadership. Apple pulled out all the stops to market the movie, including using its Wallet app to send a push notification with a discount for tickets to the film. To promote “F1,” Cook appeared with movie star Brad Pitt at an Apple store in New York and posted a video with actual F1 racer Lewis Hamilton, who was one of the film’s producers.

(L-R) Brad Pitt, Lewis Hamilton, Tim Cook, and Damson Idris attend the World Premiere of “F1: The Movie” in Times Square on June 16, 2025 in New York City.

Jamie Mccarthy | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Although Apple services chief Eddy Cue said in a recent interview that Apple needs the its film business to be profitable to “continue to do great things,” “F1” isn’t just about the bottom line for the company.

Apple’s Hollywood productions are perhaps the most prominent face of the company’s services business, a profit engine that has been an investor favorite since the iPhone maker started highlighting the division in 2016.

Films will only ever be a small fraction of the services unit, which also includes payments, iCloud subscriptions, magazine bundles, Apple Music, game bundles, warranties, fees related to digital payments and ad sales. Plus, even the biggest box office smashes would be small on Apple’s scale — the company does over $1 billion in sales on average every day.

But movies are the only services component that can get celebrities like Pitt or George Clooney to appear next to an Apple logo — and the success of “F1” means that Apple could do more big popcorn films in the future.

“Nothing breeds success or inspires future investment like a current success,” said Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

But if “F1” is a sign that Apple’s services business is in full throttle, the company’s AI struggles are a “check engine” light that won’t turn off.

Replacing Siri’s engine

At WWDC last month, Wall Street was eager to hear about the company’s plans for Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI features that it first revealed in 2024. Apple Intelligence, which is a key tenet of the company’s hardware products, had a rollout marred by delays and underwhelming features.

Apple spent most of WWDC going over smaller machine learning features, but did not reveal what investors and consumers increasingly want: A sophisticated Siri that can converse fluidly and get stuff done, like making a restaurant reservation. In the age of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, the expectation of AI assistants among consumers is growing beyond “Siri, how’s the weather?”

The company had previewed a significantly improved Siri in the summer of 2024, but earlier this year, those features were delayed to sometime in 2026. At WWDC, Apple didn’t offer any updates about the improved Siri beyond that the company was “continuing its work to deliver” the features in the “coming year.” Some observers reduced their expectations for Apple’s AI after the conference.

“Current expectations for Apple Intelligence to kickstart a super upgrade cycle are too high, in our view,” wrote Jefferies analysts this week.

Siri should be an example of how Apple’s ability to improve products and projects over the long-term makes it tough to compete with.

It beat nearly every other voice assistant to market when it first debuted on iPhones in 2011. Fourteen years later, Siri remains essentially the same one-off, rigid, question-and-answer system that struggles with open-ended questions and dates, even after the invention in recent years of sophisticated voice bots based on generative AI technology that can hold a conversation.

Apple’s strongest rivals, including Android parent Google, have done way more to integrate sophisticated AI assistants into their devices than Apple has. And Google doesn’t have the same reflex against collecting data and cloud processing as privacy-obsessed Apple.

Some analysts have said they believe Apple has a few years before the company’s lack of competitive AI features will start to show up in device sales, given the company’s large installed base and high customer loyalty. But Apple can’t get lapped before it re-enters the race, and its former design guru Jony Ive is now working on new hardware with OpenAI, ramping up the pressure in Cupertino.

“The three-year problem, which is within an investment time frame, is that Android is racing ahead,” Needham senior internet analyst Laura Martin said on CNBC this week.

Apple’s services success with projects like “F1” is an example of what the company can do when it sets clear goals in public and then executes them over extended time-frames.

Its AI strategy could use a similar long-term plan, as customers and investors wonder when Apple will fully embrace the technology that has captivated Silicon Valley.

Wall Street’s anxiety over Apple’s AI struggles was evident this week after Bloomberg reported that Apple was considering replacing Siri’s engine with Anthropic or OpenAI’s technology, as opposed to its own foundation models.

The move, if it were to happen, would contradict one of Apple’s most important strategies in the Cook era: Apple wants to own its core technologies, like the touchscreen, processor, modem and maps software, not buy them from suppliers.

Using external technology would be an admission that Apple Foundation Models aren’t good enough yet for what the company wants to do with Siri.

“They’ve fallen farther and farther behind, and they need to supercharge their generative AI efforts” Martin said. “They can’t do that internally.”

Apple might even pay billions for the use of Anthropic’s AI software, according to the Bloomberg report. If Apple were to pay for AI, it would be a reversal from current services deals, like the search deal with Alphabet where the Cupertino company gets paid $20 billion per year to push iPhone traffic to Google Search.

The company didn’t confirm the report and declined comment, but Wall Street welcomed the report and Apple shares rose.

In the world of AI in Silicon Valley, signing bonuses for the kinds of engineers that can develop new models can range up to $100 million, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“I can’t see Apple doing that,” Martin said.

Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo bragging about hiring 11 AI experts from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s DeepMind. That came after Zuckerberg hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new AI division as part of a $14.3 billion deal.

Meta’s not the only company to spend hundreds of millions on AI celebrities to get them in the building. Google spent big to hire away the founders of Character.AI, Microsoft got its AI leader by striking a deal with Inflection and Amazon hired the executive team of Adept to bulk up its AI roster.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t announced any big AI hires in recent years. While Cook rubs shoulders with Pitt, the actual race may be passing Apple by.

WATCH: Jefferies upgrades Apple to ‘Hold’

Jefferies upgrades Apple to 'Hold'

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Musk backs Sen. Paul’s criticism of Trump’s megabill in first comment since it passed

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Musk backs Sen. Paul's criticism of Trump's megabill in first comment since it passed

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who bombarded President Donald Trump‘s signature spending bill for weeks, on Friday made his first comments since the legislation passed.

Musk backed a post on X by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said the bill’s budget “explodes the deficit” and continues a pattern of “short-term politicking over long-term sustainability.”

The House of Representatives narrowly passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Thursday, sending it to Trump to sign into law.

Paul and Musk have been vocal opponents of Trump’s tax and spending bill, and repeatedly called out the potential for the spending package to increase the national debt.

On Monday, Musk called it the “DEBT SLAVERY bill.”

The independent Congressional Budget Office has said the bill could add $3.4 trillion to the $36.2 trillion of U.S. debt over the next decade. The White House has labeled the agency as “partisan” and continuously refuted the CBO’s estimates.

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The bill includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts, increased spending for immigration enforcement and large cuts to funding for Medicaid and other programs.

It also cuts tax credits and support for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles, a particularly sore spot for Musk, who has several companies that benefit from the programs.

“I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post in early June as the pair traded insults and threats.

Shares of Tesla plummeted as the feud intensified, with the company losing $152 billion in market cap on June 5 and putting the company below $1 trillion in value. The stock has largely rebounded since, but is still below where it was trading before the ruckus with Trump.

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Tesla one-month stock chart.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger and Erin Doherty contributed to this article.

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