ARK Invest’s CEO Cathie Wood is looking ahead to the future of artificial intelligence (AI), its implications on the global workforce, and its potential threat to giants like Alphabet Inc‘s GOOG GOOGL Google.
What Happened: Wood spoke at Fortune’s Most Powerful Next Gen conference this week, and shared her optimistic outlook on AI, saying it could substantially augment productivity. “The initial disruption is going to be pretty widespread, but in a good way. It’s going to help companies and people increase their productivity,” she predicted.
Wood highlighted the significant impact of AI on anyone working in front of a computer. She noted, “The knowledge worker industry globally is paid $32 trillion, it’s one of the most expensive line items in any company,” suggesting that this figure is likely to decrease due to the rise of AI.
She also acknowledged the potential fallout. “There are going to be people displaced. No question about it,” Wood said. Still, she remained positive about the remaining workforce, saying, “each person who remains on the job will become highly productive and actually could earn a lot more.”
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Why It Matters: The ARK Invest CEO also emphasized the crucial role of natural language processing (NLP) in the rise of AI. “The big breakthroughs are all around natural language processing,” she said. According to Wood, everyone will become a kind of programmer, more specifically, a “prompt engineer.”
“We’re all going to become programmers. That’s the big message out of this.”
Her vision of a prompt-driven world might be a threat to Google, she suggested. “I’ve never liked Google search. You have to prompt it in a certain kind of way. ChatGPT is much easier. And I think it really is going to cause a lot of problems for Google,” she said.
Ark Invest was a buyer in Palantir Technologies, Inc. PLTR this week as the stock shot up to its highest level in over a year.
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