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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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Mark Zuckerberg names ex-OpenAI employee chief scientist of new Meta AI lab

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Mark Zuckerberg names ex-OpenAI employee chief scientist of new Meta AI lab

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech during the Meta Connect annual event, at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said Shengjia Zhao, the co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will serve as the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence hiring blitz in recent weeks, highlighted by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI. In June, Zuckerberg announced a new organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs that’s made up of top AI researchers and engineers. 

Zhao’s name was listed among other new hires in the June memo, but Zuckerberg said Friday that Zhao co-founded the lab and “has been our lead scientist from day one.” Zhao will work directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who is acting as Meta’s chief AI officer.

“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field,” Zuckerberg wrote in a social media post. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.”

Read more CNBC tech news

In addition to co-creating ChatGPT, Zhao helped build OpenAI’s GPT-4, mini models, 4.1 and o3, and he previously led synthetic data at OpenAI, according to Zuckerberg’s June memo.

Meta Superintelligence Labs will be where employees work on foundation models such as the open-source Llama family of AI models, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research projects.

The social media company will invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into AI compute infrastructure, Zuckerberg said earlier this month.

“The next few years are going to be very exciting!” Zuckerberg wrote Friday.

WATCH: Meta announces massive ‘Prometheus’ & ‘Hyperion’ data center plans

Meta announces massive 'Prometheus' & 'Hyperion' data center plans

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Palantir joins list of 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with stock more than doubling in 2025

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Palantir joins list of 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with stock more than doubling in 2025

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, speaks on a panel titled Power, Purpose, and the New American Century at the Hill and Valley Forum at the U.S. Capitol on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

Palantir has hit another major milestone in its meteoric stock rise. It’s now one of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies.

The provider of software and data analytics technology to defense agencies saw its stock rise more than 2% on Friday to another record, lifting the company’s market cap to $375 billion, which puts it ahead of Home Depot and Procter & Gamble. The company’s market value was already higher than Bank of America and Coca-Cola.

Palantir has more than doubled in value this year as investors ramp up bets on the company’s artificial intelligence business and closer ties to the U.S. government. Since its founding in 2003 by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, the company has steadily accrued a growing list of customers.

Revenue in Palantir’s U.S. government business increased 45% to $373 million in its most recent quarter, while total sales rose 39% to $884 million. The company next reports results on Aug. 4.

Earlier this year, Palantir soared ahead of Salesforce, IBM and Cisco into the top 10 U.S. tech companies by market cap.

Buying the stock at these levels requires investors to pay hefty multiples. Palantir currently trades for 273 times forward earnings, according to FactSet. The only other company in the top 20 with a triple-digit ratio is Tesla at 175.

With $3.1 billion in total revenue over the past year, Palantir is a fraction the size of the next smallest company by sales among the top 20 by market cap. Mastercard, which is valued at $518 billion, is closest with sales over the past four quarters of roughly $29 billion.

WATCH: Palantir’s Mike Gallagher: Enforcing a ceasefire will require a greater investment of American power

Palantir's Mike Gallagher: Enforcing a ceasefire will require a greater investment of American power

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Inside Tesla’s new retro-futuristic Supercharger diner

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Inside Tesla's new retro-futuristic Supercharger diner

Tesla has opened the doors to its first diner Supercharger station in Los Angeles.

CEO Elon Musk first teased the concept of building a drive-in themed charging station in 2018. On Monday, that vision was finally realized. Tesla describes the two-story restaurant, constructed of a steel exterior inspired by the Cybertruck, as retro-futuristic. It features 80 charging stalls and two 66-foot megascreens playing a rotation of short films, feature-length movies and Tesla videos.

The diner operates 24/7 serving classic American comfort food, such as burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches and milkshakes, to both electric vehicle owners charging their cars and the general public. CNBC visited the site and spoke with early patrons, who praised both the design and the food.

“It’s pretty cool. It has a very vintage vibe, but futuristic vibe at the same time” said Taju, who stopped by with a friend who drives a Tesla.

“I would bring friends from out of town, they would be very impressed coming to a place like this” said Don, a Model 3 owner who visited with his wife and neighbor.

Also on display for a limited time was Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, which served popcorn and interacted playfully with guests. Less than 24 hours after opening, the line to order food stretched around the block.

Musk has said that if the concept proves successful, Tesla may open similar diner Supercharger stations in other major cities.

Watch the video to see what it’s like inside Tesla’s first diner charging station. 

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