Will AI help you do your job or replace you?

Will AI help you do your job or replace you?Published5 minutes agoByFaisal Islam, Economics editor, Phil Leake, Miguel Roca-Terry, Data journalists and Jess Carr, Data designerArtificial Intelligence (AI) companies are making vast claims about the ability of their tools to replace human labour.Some jobs will be automated, others will be "augmented". The bosses of the world's biggest companies are diverting vast sums into these tools, partly with the knowledge that they could save money on headcount."Flat is the new up", we are told, in terms of the size of a company's workforce as investors ask whether jobs should be done by new recruits - or, instead, armies of "AI Agents", virtual workers tasked with doing specific roles, some of them relatively skilled.If even half true there will be an impact on us all, across sectors and individual careers, and perhaps it will happen sooner than we think. Nobel prize-winning economists recently warned the world “must act now”, external to ensure that AI leads to rising living standards and not large-scale job displacement, and last month London businesses warned they were struggling to find the skills they need as AI disrupts the jobs market.It is early days yet, but there are already some notable patterns in the data.This chart is the industry benchmark for how various models can perform the tasks previously done by humans, in this case using and developing computer software.This measure showed that three years ago, large language models (LLMs) were only able to reliably complete tasks humans took seconds or minutes to do. Now they are increasingly able to complete fairly complex tasks taking an hour or so.Now, some of the LLMs can find problems in a cryptocurrency contract and even develop and streamline the model itself, which would take a human several hours.The latest generation of models could start to entirely develop themselves in the next year or so. This is just software coding,...