Creativity from the machine – the man who will change your life

What it’s about

The AI revolution is running differently than expected. For decades the prediction was: machines first take over simple, physical work; creative tasks stay safe. The opposite is happening. ChatGPT, DALL-E, Whisper – the programs from OpenAI write advertising copy, paint pictures, transcribe speech in almost 100 languages. The first jobs threatened are those that involve knowledge, language and creativity. That will change work – and faster than many believe.

The view from Silicon Valley

More than 150 start-ups in the Bay Area are currently trying to translate AI into business models. Venture capitalists are competing for the best teams; valuations are exploding. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, has become the world’s most-asked technology thinker. His company is considered the pioneer, and he has personally managed to make a technology that researchers used to discuss only at conferences a part of everyday conversation with ChatGPT.

Where AI lands first

Six industries stand out as early-affected: advertising and marketing, customer service, law, media, software development and consulting. In each of these, AI will not replace the entire profession – but it will replace a substantial part of the routine work. That changes task allocation, salary structure and training requirements. Anyone who learns to work with the tools early will win. Anyone who avoids them loses pace.

What follows

OpenAI wants more. The goal is not a chatbot but a system that can learn any task – an artificial general intelligence. Whether that goal is reachable in this decade is open. But even the interim status changes work more fundamentally than the internet did. That is why ChatGPT is not just a product but a signal: the next industrial revolution is not announced – it is already running.

I wrote the full story together with Christof Kerkmann for Handelsblatt.