OpenAI is currently at the forefront of developing powerful AI models, while its ChatGPT product is rewriting our traditional way of looking for new information. The company"s CEO, Sam Altman, now says AI could even help humans discover new knowledge. He also described AI agents as junior employees.
Speaking at the Snowflake Summit 2025, Altman boasted that AI agents can act like junior employees, saying, "You hear people that talk about their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, look at the quality, figure out how it fits together, give feedback, and it sounds a lot like how they work with a team of still relatively junior employees."
OpenAI CEO also added AI agents could help humans discover new knowledge in "limited cases" or "figure out solutions to business problems that are kind of very non-trivial."
While the use of AI for scientific discovery is still viewed with skepticism, the technology has proven its capabilities for new discoveries in several cases. For example, the Microsoft Discovery platform, designed for accelerating scientific research and development by AI agents, was recently able to discover a new chemical for cooling data centers in just 200 hours, a process that normally takes years to research and complete by humans.
AI firms are also shifting their focus toward developing AI agents capable of performing various tasks. OpenAI recently unveiled Codex, which contains AI agents for helping programmers write and debug code. According to Altman, OpenAI engineers are already using Codex.
As AI agents become more intelligent, more employees should be concerned about losing their jobs. Companies have already started replacing some specific roles with AI. For example, Duolingo has replaced its contract workers with AI, while Shopify managers need to provide reasons why AI cannot handle a job before seeking approval for new hires.
Via: Business Insider