AUSTIN, Texas — Austinite Ron Green has worked in artificial intelligence since the 1990s, but says the last five years have brought the technology to life.
“I’ve been in the technology business for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything moving this fast in my life,” he said.
While many forms of AI are a normal aspect of everyday life, recent additions have created more buzz. That includes self-driving cars, pose estimation, which predicts human body parts and joints in images or videos, and ChatGPT.
“The dream that we would have these systems that can perform at a human or superhuman reality is now a reality,” Green said.
Green is the co-founder and chief financial officer of Kung Fu.AI. He has a team of around 40 employees, including principal machine learning engineer Numa Dhamani. The company is helping other companies implement growing AI technologies.
“This is where we’re all excited is performing at a superhuman level,” Green said. “Doing things that are vastly beyond individual human capabilities.”
According to several state agencies, nearly 5,000 Texans have been laid off in 2023. So how does AI factor into the conversation?
Green and Dhamani see it as a major boost with a need for humans to work alongside this type of machine intelligence.
“I read a study which stated nearly 60% of the jobs today didn’t exist in 1940,” Dhamani said. “You kind of go through this shift in technology that actually creates more jobs, so we’ll see some more of that soon.”
In this ever-changing world, Texas Workforce Commission Chairman Bryan Daniel is monitoring this trend closely and believes at the moment, AI will change jobs more than eliminate them.
“We think about what skills the humans that would possibly get replaced have and how they can bring them to a higher and better use,” Daniel said. “Might take a little bit of training. Might mean a little more money if you get a promotion, but someone has to check the work the AI is doing.”
The TWC has several technology panels and groups dedicated to new-age additions and said the key is to see where AI could be implemented in the future.
“We’re trying to get ahead of this by finding out where technology companies are headed so we can put some plans in place,” Daniel said.
At the moment, teams at Kung FU.AI say they’re just scratching the surface of this uncharted machine learning frontier.
“If you’re an expert as of a year ago, you’re no longer an expert. It’s moving that fast,” Green said.