British-Bangladeshi tech entrepreneur Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, has warned of the "complete destruction" of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market due to AI in 2025.
"AI is better than any Indian programmer that's outsourced right now... 2025 will witness the complete destruction of the BPO market," he is heard saying on 'Moonshots' with Peter Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE Foundation.
"Being in person is going to be good for your job right now because anything remote will be the first to go," Mostaque says as he goes to predict that economies such as India will be the first casualties of the AI adoption spree. "The next to be affected will be the remote workers in the US," he adds.
Salim Ismail, a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist, who was also on the show, seconded Mostaque. "I think it happens in two phases... one you have this massive downside and then phase two, the really good ones. Just show up and just generate a tonne more code because there's just so much more code to be written. But I think it's going to have a really detrimental effect any kind of software maintenance, support systems, etc. All (will) go out of the window very quickly," Ismail says.
A passionate advocate for open source, Mostaque has long been a leading voice for developers and a vocal figure among AI ethicists. He had signed an open letter calling for a pause in training powerful AI systems, along with Elon Musk, and several other industry big-shots.
Emad founded Intelligent Internet and is the former CEO and co-founder of Stability AI, a company funding the development of open-source music- and image-generating systems such as dance diffusion, stable diffusion, and stable video 3D. He stepped down as the CEO of Stability AI in March 2024.