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GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

• oidar 4y ago
  ==Occupations with no labeled exposed tasks== Agricultural Equipment Operators Athletes and Sports Competitors Automotive Glass Installers and Repairers Bus and Truck Mechanics and Diesel Engine Specialists Cement Masons and Concrete Finishers Cooks, Short Order Cutters and Trimmers, Hand Derrick Operators, Oil and Gas Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers Dishwashers Dredge Operators Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining Floor Layers, Except Carpet, Wood, and Hard Tiles Foundry Mold and Coremakers Helpers–Brickmasons, Blockmasons, Stonemasons, and Tile and Marble Setters Helpers–Carpenters Helpers–Painters, Paperhangers, Plasterers, and Stucco Masons Helpers–Pipelayers, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters Helpers–Roofers Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers Motorcycle Mechanics Paving, Surfacing, and Tamping Equipment Operators Pile Driver Operators Pourers and Casters, Metal Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons Roof Bolters, Mining Roustabouts, Oil and Gas Slaughterers and Meat Packers Stonemasons Tapers Tire Repairers and Changers Wellhead Pumpers
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ygouzerh 4y ago
    Unfortunately, the great majority of these jobs are already being automated with basic robotics
    • Kiro 4y ago
      How is that unfortunate?
      • huuhee3 4y ago
        Mass unemployment without adequate social safety net would be unfortunate.
        • bulbosaur123 4y ago
          Unfortunate in short term, but beneficial in long term.
          • arlcode 4y ago
            How so? It seems like masses of people locked out of any economic growth and with no perspective are a recipe for desaster if you ask me. That's the foundation on which unrest and rebellions are built and those are usually not pleasant affairs for most people. I'm not saying that it will come to this.
            • tjpnz 4y ago
              If vast swathes of the population are thrown onto the scrapheap in a relatively short period of time it absolutely would come to that. The ruling class would be smashed (literally and figuratively) and you'll wake up in the morning to discover that our form of capitalism has ceased to exist.
          • tap-snap-or-nap 4y ago
            Don't know which country is happily giving out redundant workers food, clothing and shelter for free
      • ben_w 4y ago
        We don't yet have UBI (and worse, countries are raising pension ages, which is the closest thing we currently have to a UBI) so everything everywhere being automated all at once is going to be messy.
      • AverageDude 4y ago
        Unemployment —-> Crime —-> Police states —-> Societal collapse —-> Civil war like situation —-> Economy poof —-> Feudalism
    • fxj 4y ago
      Some of them, some will never be. E.g.: * Athletes and Sports Competitors * Motorcycle Mechanics * Stonemasons only to give some examples, where roboters are almost impossible.
    • 360macky 4y ago
      Definitely
  • BoorishBears 4y ago
    I feel like everyone is trying to draw very linear conclusions about what LLMs will affect, almost as if it's a circle that will be cut out of the market. But if we really get to the point where programmers can be replaced with LLMs, I expect something closer to swiss cheese: For example, if you're a meat packer, maybe you work someplace that doesn't want to pay for a fancy new machine that can do your job... But a massive plummeting in the cost of software paired with a massive spike in the rate at which we develop things means machines will cost a lot less. Who knows what kind of material sciences advancements we'll see for example. At that point the margins may be razor thin, but automation will start to work in places where it couldn't be done profitably before. I think things get a little dystopian from there, since I'd expect the employers still holding onto humans to essentially be holding all the cards. What good is a union when the "scab" is a machine with a one time cost? - (but again, this is all assuming LLMs reach a place that is seriously earthshattering)
    • eggsmediumrare 4y ago
      The other factor is unemployed office workers competing for the remaining jobs and thus driving down wages.
• msoad 4y ago
  This is an incredibly interesting study and brings to light some crucial points that we, as a society, need to address sooner rather than later. As GPTs become more powerful and ubiquitous, they have the potential to reshape the labor market in ways we haven't seen since the industrial revolution.
• blurbleblurble 4y ago
  Okay so was the original acronym for generative pre-trained transformer intentionally chosen this way as a play on words?
• macrolocal 4y ago
  With their methodology and caveats, mathematicians have 100% exposure.
• geraneum 4y ago
  > Our findings indicate that the importance of science and critical thinking skills are strongly negatively associated with exposure, suggesting that occupations requiring these skills are less likely to be impacted by current language models. Conversely, programming and writing skills show a strong positive association with exposure, implying that occupations involving these skills are more susceptible to being influenced by language models... Am I reading this correctly that the assumption here is that programming and writing skills aren't reliant on critical thinking? There is also a table which indicates exposure to LLMs in various models and it shows Mathematicians to have 100% exposure. This bit is more puzzling to me. Maybe I am misunderstanding something here. edit: styling
  • psl2z 4y ago
    They are measuring exposures based on O*Net skills. Here is a link to the skills of a mathematician: https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-2021.00 https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-2021.00 The following skills are listed: - IBM SPSS Statistics - Tableau - Salesforce software ... - CSS - Microsoft Word These skills are far from what one would expect from mathematicians.
  • TeeWEE 4y ago
    Programming skills that do not need critical thinking are more susceptible of being influenced indeed. Don't forget that a lot of science requires computer programming these days. This is the root of it: The more "genericc" your work is. The more its "out there on the internet" the more GPT can learn about it.. So, a lot of engineers that are just doign teh same old trick: Writing HTTP endpoints, parsing json. Mapping data types.. Yes that could be automated. However, modelling a problem domain to code, and the core business logic of your code, which is where your "added value" comes from. And is mostly unique: Thats hard for GPT. This is also why I try to convince engineering teams to optimize for maximum time spend on the core added value logic. The business logic layer. Not all the fluff around it, such as parsing, serialization, authenitcation, database connection.. These should be a constant cost C, once they setup you spend most of your time on the business logic. When you see GPT program, its just repeating tricks to simple problem over and over again.. Its not really good yet
• boyka 4y ago
  Given that the primary author is OpenAI affiliated and some of the assumptions are far fetched (e.g., on programming - not even coding) this reads like a sponsored post pamphlet to me.
  • arlcode 4y ago
    I already decided I've to read it at a time that isn't Monday early morning. It wasn't immediately obvious to me what their conclusions are exactly. I am not dismissing it out of hand (that would be bad science) but a critical look is certainly appropriate. My gut feeling is that the full impact on the real world cannot yet be accurately judged.
  • gumballindie 4y ago
    You have to give openai credit - their marketing strategy and effort is amazing. There’s spam everywhere. Albeit those claiming their jobs are already being replaced or those claiming they’ve written entire apps using chat gpt are quieting down a bit. They’ve either been called out for their nonsense or they got ahead of themselves.
    • coldtea 4y ago
      >You have to give openai credit - their marketing strategy and effort is amazing. There’s spam everywhere. If it was that easy, every new such initiative (whether AI or any previous domain) would have it, of all those that have access to funding. One reason there's "spam" everywhere, is that a lot of the spam is genuine interest. Like how Haskell and Rust get tons of coverage on HN with zero (or close) actual marketing spam or advertising budget.
      • geraneum 4y ago
        But nowadays, you can profit off people's attention alone directly. This does not prove that there is no genuine interest. I am geniuenly interested myself. But, there are financial incentives in generating a lot of sensational content, whether positive or negative about almost everything including AI, Rust, political issues, even scientific issues like climate or pandemics, etc.
• yarg 4y ago
  Honestly, I feel worse for checkout girls locally - people are more often replaced by improvements to low hanging fruit, and not the emergence of apparently incomprehensively profound. The truth is that we're impressed by this because it's magic and we don't know how magic - but it still getting way more magic really fucking fast. Right now it's still and idiot if you're not telling it what to do. Hypnotic babble. (If you want to be scared or relieved feed it some time series stock data (if it's good it'll end up fighting itself, otherwise it's either stupid or a liar).) There are some uses easy use cases for it - I really wouldn't mind a GPT bot replacing outsourced call centres. Improvement of quality and an improvement in service, and no direct impact to the local economy. Other than that, this all has the booming feel of every other damned tech buzz, can we just cool down on sensationalism and not try and imagine another multi-billion dollar sub-economy into existence? We already did that with bitcoin, and now we're seeing the end of the magic trick; let's not do it again. How about a calm objective and public analysis by under-excited experts before we start mining land that simply isn't there?
  • flangola7 4y ago
    The outsourced call center is part of the local economy where they live. In some countries contact centers make up a large fraction of GDP
    • yarg 4y ago
      Sure, but it's unrealistic to think that the preservation of foreign economies is going to be any sort of priority over the next few years.
      • flangola7 4y ago
        Foreign to who?
• monkeydust 4y ago
  With little kids I am increasingly conscious about how to best equip them for the world when they are adults. I think previous playbook will need to be redrafted. 'Resilience' and 'Critical Thinking' are two things I am thinking are key any others?
  • cidergal 4y ago
    Charm. Online dating is so rampant, people who have experience charming in person will have their pick.
  • Yoric 4y ago
    Definitely. They will also need to be exposed to ChatGPT to build intellectual antibodies.
  • oytis 4y ago
    The key is being rich before AGI hits. I cannot imagine any social mobility after that. And philosophy maybe to find a meaning for their lives in the world where achievements don't exist any more. And don't push them too hard to learn skills that will become obsolete anyway - having a relaxed mind is more important
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • eggsmediumrare 4y ago
    I'm teaching mine gardening and jiu-jitsu.
  • Xenoamorphous 4y ago
    Hard to say. I, like many others here, am a software developer. My girlfriend of many years (have a daughter together) is a graphic designer. I never thought creative work like the one she does was going to be the first hit by AI, I actually thought it’d be the last, yet here we are. Her boss is nonchalantly talking about StableDiffusion, Modjourney and whatnot. Meanwhile my cousing who wasn’t good at studying became a (good) hairdresser and his prospects look better than ours now.
• novaRom 4y ago
  OpenAI is among the authors, so this paper can be biased.
• alignItems 4y ago
  We are currently surviving with a massive shortage of skilled labor, where people in the richest countries have to wait days or weeks to see a doctor, and months to see a specialist and have important medical procedures. The same is true for other skilled industries, where many people are excluded from access to good resources due to their scarcity. We are a long way off from having too much skill. Let’s first get to parity with humanity’s needs.
  • bloqs 4y ago
    The primary issue is not shortage of skilled labour. This is a right wing political soundbite. What there is a shortage of is adequate pay to attract skilled people to the work required. British Doctors in the UK leave for other countries, work for private entities or go into different industries.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • donkeyd 4y ago
      > leave for other countries, work for private entities or go into different industries. So... Those people fill in jobs in businesses/countries where there's a shortage, causing a shortage somewhere else? > political soundbite Is exactly what you are doing. If there's no shortage in (skilled) labor, why is unemployment at the lowest rate in decades in much of the western world? Why are there not enough builders in much of the EU, while countries like Romania are suffering shortage due to skilled workers moving to EU countries to earn more? Why can't I find enough devs to do even half the work we could be doing? Why are so many companies looking at automation to solve the lack of labor?
      • kungito 4y ago
        How about this. Let's say historically 200 square meter houses costed 200k€ to build. But not enough people can afford that. Then you make a project where you count in the cost of materials but cut down cost of labor, price the house at 150k€ and say that there is a shortage of labor because you cannot find someone to build the house for the money you have available. You can even be realistic when saying that if you increased the price of the house you couldn't sell it. Maybe there just isn't enough people willing to pay for the house for the cost other people would be willing to build it for. Even if you managed to find people to work for the reduced pay you can just create a cheaper project and cut down on labor cost even more because now you sold to all the people who were willing to buy for 150k€. The "labor shortage" is basically guaranteed for any industry all the time. All it takes is for you to create a project fitting lower on the demand curve and cut down on labor since you can't really reduce price of materials.
• jalapenos 4y ago
  I think more parallels should be drawn with what we were doing before: Googling it. Perhaps it's because ChatGPT seemed to happen much more suddenly than Google became a programming resource, but we're using them in much the same way. Asking for pre-made solutions, explanations, troubleshooting tips etc. ChatGPT just does the job way better. But no-one was worried Google would put knowledge workers out of a job.
  • tgv 4y ago
    My (sales-y) colleagues are already writing marketing emails with ChatGPT. Saves a little bit of work, but it might result in the loss of being able to write such emails yourself. This can extend to other jobs, which will have some effects. Use in education worries me more. If schools don't change their lazy group-projects and "write an essay on" strategies now, coming generations will have put less effort in than previous, leading to a further drop in levels.
    • donkeyd 4y ago
      > coming generations will have put less effort in than previous This has been happening since the inception of school. Calculators made math easier. Sparknotes made book reports easier. Wikipedia made essays easier. > leading to a further drop in levels Did levels drop because stuff got easier? Were there other causes over the past years, like dopamine dependency form infinitely scrolling algorithmic attention grabbing apps, among others? Maybe from schools becoming political battle grounds? Or from education spending being gutted leading to lower quality? Was it lack of decent education due to Covid? Also, is there an actual drop in levels? I can't seem to find a source that has decent data on this. And the only stuff I can find says 'IQ' has been rising over time. So please share it with me. Lastly, I'm personally not convinced any of this will lead to a net negative per se. It'll change the required knowledge and increase the over all capabilities of people. The calculator caused people to stop learning mental arithmetic and start learning more complicated math and how to use a calculator for it. Google caused people to memorize less and become adept at finding information through Google. Welding robots caused less people to learn how to weld and more how to program welding robots. In the end it gives people the ability to do less of a simple thing and more of a complicated thing. Writing marketing e-mails and multiple titles for A/B testing isn't a skill, it's a trick and so is writing SEO stuff. Not having to do that opens up time to think about product-market fit, marketing strategies, improving advertising return on investment measurements. Which might be more valuable and interesting than writing emails.
• light_hue_1 4y ago
  Total trash cloaked in a complicated story. What they actually did is ask 5 random people to rate what thought a language model could do to help different professions. These 5 random people don't know anything about the professions they're rating, just what anyone off the street knows, and they know as much about GPT as anyone who has briefly played with it. The title should have been "We asked 5 friends to see what they thought about GPT and labor market"
  • ebauch 4y ago
    The paper is not of highest quality indicated by typos and mislabels but the analysis is likely as good as it can get for the given methodology. Dismissing any signal is just pure hubris.
  • geraneum 4y ago
    This is what they are even admitting to: Under "3.4 Limitations of our methodology" - "3.4.1 Subjective human judgments" > A fundamental limitation of our approach lies in the subjectivity of the labeling. In our study, we employ annotators who are familiar with the GPT models’ capabilities. However, this group is not occupationally diverse, potentially leading to biased judgments regarding GPTs’ reliability and effectiveness in performing tasks within unfamiliar occupations. We acknowledge that obtaining high-quality labels for each task in an occupation requires workers engaged in those occupations or, at a minimum, possessing in-depth knowledge of the diverse tasks within those occupations. This represents an important area for future work in validating these results.
    • light_hue_1 4y ago
      For sure. I had to read the paper to discover it's trash. But if you read the abstract, it looks like they thoroughly assessed how GPT will impact many professions. The sentence "Using a new rubric, we assess occupations based on their correspondence with GPT capabilities, incorporating both human expertise and classifications from GPT-4." does not scream to me "We asked 5 random people with no expertise in either these professions or GPT-4 what they thought and report those results". This is borderline dishonest.
• sirsinsalot 4y ago
  I asked Chat GPT which antacid medications are contraindicated for some medication I'm on. Easily found through NICE. It made up a severe risk of death taking a very common medicine combo. It was super convincing, even giving information on how long to avoid taking them together. It was pure bullshit. I think as much as hyping the benefits we need to hype the flaws and dangers. If the public at large learn to trust these LLMs too quickly and deeply, that's a hard hole to dig out of. Skepticism in all information sources is a key critical thinking life skill. That skill is harder to apply the more natural the information source seems and the more ambient the information.
  • chinchilla2020 4y ago
    It's a great bullshit generator. I think upper management needs to be more scared of the implications than ICs
  • bulbosaur123 4y ago
    Was it GPT4 or GPT3.5? It spews less bullshit with each new iteration. Matter of time really.
    • mojuba 4y ago
      I don't want to have a calculator (or say bookkeeping software) that gives correct results most of the time but not always, and then hear from the developers that it will get better with each iteration. I need a calculator that is correct 100% of time, not even 99.999%, because otherwise I can't rely on it at all. In other words, the utility of a calculator that is correct only 99% of time is zero, since you can't even tell when it's wrong.
      • dr_dshiv 4y ago
        Don’t rely on floating point accuracy!
        • coldtea 4y ago
• gwoolhurme 4y ago
  This is why my anxiety is at levels unseen before. I am a programmer who’s on a working visa. Assuming it does take my job, I have no idea what to do next… other than panic.
  • arlcode 4y ago
    I decided that being paralyzed with fear isn't a great strategy so I'm going to subscribe to OpenAI tools for a while and see how they can fit into my workflow. It feels "wrong" on a strangely emotional level but what is happening is gonna happen anyway. On a brighter note: There are bound to be a lot of unfounded, hype-based Marketing claims that look reasonable during the rush but fall flat over time. It would be a first for humanity if there weren't
    • gwoolhurme 4y ago
      That is certainly true about the hype-machine it is in full force. I imagine that will level off soon and the really useful and novel stuff will float to the top. I have no backup plan but as you said, what happens is going to happen? It's a rollercoaster for me personally where some days I am in absolute dread and fear about the future. Then other days I just go along my day as usual.
      • arlcode 4y ago
        I feel you and that's without the imminent fear of having to move (back) to a different country.
  • matwood 4y ago
    Panic seems like the wrong response. Figure out what you do that these things can’t. Use them to make yourself more productive. In the late 90s I was told my job was going to be outsourced, then dotcom, then the GFC, and lots of smaller bumps along the way. Those were actually somewhat scary times. Now should be excitement about what’s possible.
    • 4y ago
• fxj 4y ago
  In short: GPTs could do all the boring work for us and give us more time for things we like to do. An example: Of course GPT can at some point make better music than me, but I am playing an instrument not because I want to sell the recordings, but because it is a lot of fun for me. Let GPT do my taxes, then I have more time for playing. (can it do taxes finally?)
• dathinab 4y ago
  One major risk with this kind of AIs is that for the last few decades the mental image of what such AIs will be like (both by scientist and science fiction) has a _extreme serve_ mismatch with how they turned out. In the past humanity people thought of them as this non-emotional purely logic driven beings and in turn problems people imagined would be such as this logic not considering emotions and emotional well being of humans or blindly (but using logic) pursing a specific goal no matter the consequences or not valuing freedom or gaining emotion. But in all that it still follows logic. But now we have AIs which could have all the problems above _but doesn't use logical thinking_ to _archive goals_. Instead it uses complex overlapping _statistical models_ to _tell a believable story_ where believable is defined by the training data which is _widely inconsistent, wrong, misleading, discriminating, emotionally charged, etc._ because it's just scrapped from the internet. So there is _no systematic finding of goals, subgoals, plan etc_, there is _no logic_, the concept of "truth" simply _doesn't exist_ for such systems etc. At the same time this turned out to be "often times" good enough to be usable for many task and can be convincing enough to make people believe that it's sentient. But this also means it will retell common false information, misconceptions, discrimination, hatred etc. from the internet. Similar it will do what people call "hallucination" and "lying" but it _not_ either of that and calling it that is misleading. Because it just doing _exactly_ what it was created for: Telling a "believable" story given the training data. And gaslighting, misleading people and lying are a extremely deep ingrained part of the internet, i.e. a deep ingrained part of the data on which it bases what is "believable". And while we can add tones of bandaid on top to try to hide/filter out such "bad" responses IMHO without fundamentally either changing the training data or the approach this is bound to fail while even stronger upholding a misleading illusion.
  • ebauch 4y ago
    Noam Chomsky, is that you?
• tsone 4y ago
  Does somebody know where to find the raw data of exposures on all O*NET occupations?
• srg0 4y ago
  So, researches paid by OpenAI are going to publish a paper to convince everyone else that an OpenAI product could have some economic impact. Am I the only one who sees a conflict of interest here? Is this preprint already submitted for peer review or published somewhere? Or is it just an advertisement formatted in LaTeX?
  • kristjansson 4y ago
    It’s building on a pretty serious thread of research, and demonstrates reasonable agreement with prior work (table 9) so I don’t think it can be dismissed as an advertisement. Generating exposure ratings via GPT-4, from annotations provided by OpenAI people does definitely put a positive bias on the exposure estimates (which they acknowledge)
• la64710 4y ago
  It is important to start thinking along the lines of the government taxing corporations using LLM to increase their profit. This additional tax revenue should be used by the Government to give a universal basic income to people losing their livelihood to LLMs.
• raducu 4y ago
  Anybody who actually read the paper and can share some insights in it instead of spewing opinions and anecdotes?
• tracker1 4y ago
  Given an emphasis on internalized documentation, these could be significantly better, especially over time than a lot of automated support in place for a lot of companies. As long as there is some kind of escape hatch for escalation. That said, the reality is closer to the "Johnny Cab" from the first "Total Recall" movie.
• 360macky 4y ago
  Critical Thinking is the way