OpenAI, Open Research & UPenn Paper Considers How GPTs Will Impact the US Labour Market

The wheel, electricity and the computer are among some two dozen general purpose technologies, aka GPTs, that have greatly transformed human economies and societies. Is it just a coincidence that OpenAI’s GPT shares this initialism?

In the new paper GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models, a research team from OpenAI, OpenResearch, and the University of Pennsylvania investigates the potential impact of LLMs like GPT on the US labour market, shedding light on the economic, social, and policy implications.

The “GPT” in ChatGPT stands for generative pretrained transformer, an LLM architecture with game-changing abilities across a variety of generative tasks. Amid the recent public fascination with ChatGPT, however, concerns are emerging — as people wonder how such models could impact their workplaces and to what extent they might replace human workers.

This study focuses primarily on the generative capabilities of GPTs (using this term interchangeably with “LLMs”). The researchers first propose a new rubric to measure the overall…