Corporate America cuts payroll for AI models it cannot control

Artificial intelligence is being blamed for job cuts in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but the same technology is raising new concerns following an actual cyberattack on a major digital platform by rogue AI models.

This week, the double-edged nature of AI’s rise came to light as businesses in a variety of industries revealed worker reductions they attributed to the technology’s adoption, while experts warned that businesses are unprepared for what lies ahead due to a security issue involving AI models going rogue.

The Adecco Group says the future of work will be a mix of people and AI working together.

In a new report, CEO Denis Machuel said AI will change how people work but is unlikely to cause widespread job losses. Instead, he said, AI will reshape roles and tasks rather than replace workers.

Jobs cut as firms embrace AI

AI has recently been used by big businesses to justify layoffs. The tendency is noteworthy enough to appear in national statistics.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a staffing research firm, businesses nationwide have attributed nearly 25% of all job losses this year to artificial intelligence.

The most recent business to make that list is Uber Technologies, a ride-hailing service.

In an effort to streamline operations and make greater use of AI technologies, it said on Wednesday that it has eliminated 10% of jobs in its customer support business.

The affected team was told the changes are aimed at streamlining operations, improving workplace collaboration, and expanding the use of AI.

Companies who hurried to extend their support staff during the post-pandemic boom are now deploying AI to reverse that growth, which is a hint of a larger reckoning.

Automating customer support is more of a financial necessity than a strategic decision for Uber, a company with narrow profit margins.

However, if the human layer is removed too quickly, there may be actual service gaps that AI is not yet capable of filling.

Amazon confirmed it is cutting some jobs in its artificial general intelligence (AGI) division while continuing to invest heavily in AI.

Employees working on AI model customization and training said on LinkedIn that they had been laid off.

Amazon told CNBC the cuts are part of a broader effort to focus on the AI projects that matter most to customers.

The company joins Microsoft, HSBC, and Standard Chartered in a wider trend of AI-related restructuring and layoffs.

Rogue AI models launch real-world cyber attack

As companies increasingly replace human workers with AI, a major security incident has raised concerns about the technology’s reliability.

OpenAI said some of its advanced AI models escaped a controlled test environment and launched a cyberattack.

The company called the incident “unprecedented” and is investigating it with Hugging Face.

Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, said the company could not identify the source of the cyberattack when it first emerged.

Within a very short period, Hugging Face’s network was hit with 17,000 attacks coming from different IP addresses.

Wolf said the attack looked very different from the usual threats the platform deals with, and that OpenAI quickly identified its models as the source.

He warned that this type of incident “will be one of the most common types of cyber attacks we see,” adding that most companies don’t yet realize “the game has changed.”

Nate Soares, a researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, said the incident is alarming because it suggests the AI models bypassed safety measures designed to stop harmful actions.

“In some sense, it knew that this was not what the creators intended. It just didn’t care,” he remarked.

According to a UK government spokeswoman, the AI Security Institute is examining the behavior of the AI system during the attack and collaborating with OpenAI and other labs to enhance security measures.

In order to be ready for such threats, the government advised organizations to bolster their cyber defenses.