The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) is hitting the global labor force "like a tsunami" according to International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva.
AI is likely to impact 60% of jobs in advanced economies and 40% of jobs around the world, Georgieva said in remarks Monday at an event in Zurich that was organized by the Swiss Institute of International Studies.
"We have very little time to get people ready for it, businesses ready for it," Georgieva said. "It could bring tremendous increase in productivity if we manage it well, but it can also lead to more misinformation and, of course, more inequality in our society."
She explained that the world economy has become more prone to shocks in recent years, such as the COVID pandemic and Russia's war against Ukraine. Although Georgieva said she expects more shocks to occur, she indicated the global economy has remained resilient against recession.
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Georgieva's remarks about the impact of AI on the global workforce come as tech giants are unveiling new updates to their AI models and rolling out new AI-powered features to best their rivals.
Google unveiled an AI-oriented overhaul to its search engine with a new "AI Overview" function for the U.S. starting this week, with plans to expand its availability to other countries in the near future.
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Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said the new features across its products stem from the company's Gemini family of AI models. He also noted an upcoming feature for Google Photos — called "Ask Photos" — which will let users leverage AI for quickly accessing images or memories in their photo library upon request, such as when their child learned to swim.
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on Monday announced the release of its new GPT-4o flagship model, which is capable of realistic voice conversation with users and can also interact with either text or images.
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At OpenAI's launch event, the Microsoft-backed startup demonstrated how GPT-4o was able to read a bedtime story in different voices, emotions and tones.
In another, the ChatGPT voice assistant used its vision capabilities to walk through solving a math equation that was written on a sheet of paper.
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FOX Business' Breck Dumas and Reuters contributed to this report.
