OpenAI has been warning about this possibility for quite a while. Back in 2023, when ChatGPT was still more novelty than colleague, researchers at the company and the University of Pennsylvania estimated that about 80 percent of American workers could see at least 10 percent of their tasks affected by large language models. Nearly one worker in five could see at least half their tasks affected.
The paper had the deliberately nerdy title GPTs are GPTs. The first GPT meant the artificial-intelligence models. The second meant "general-purpose technologies": inventions such as electricity or the computer that do not merely create a new industry but rearrange lots of existing ones.
Three-and-a-half years later, the rearranging appears to be proceeding nicely. On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra, its latest and most powerful model, with the ability to operate computers directly and with its advanced cybersecurity features. The company’s President Greg Brockman put it less than modestly: "Welcome to the AGI era." By Sunday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had gone further in a post on X: "AGI has arrived." If you wanted to design a Labor Day specifically to make the American worker nervous, then you would struggle to improve on this one.
Except there is an awkward problem with the story of our impending economic redundancy. An analysis published by The Economist just before Labor Day estimates that the artificial-intelligence boom has so far helped create roughly 1 million American jobs, considerably more than the roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to AI since mid-2023. America added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations.
Unemployment is 4.1 percent, a rate the American economy has bettered in barely one month out of 10 over the past half-century. Young workers, supposedly first into the AI woodchipper, are holding up surprisingly well: the unemployment gap between 20- to 24-year-olds and everyone else is close to its narrowest in decades. And The Economist found that occupations closest to the AI boom—engineers, developers, mathematicians, and data scientists—have added roughly 730,000 jobs above the trend in professional employment since 2022.
Perhaps Labor Day is not canceled quite yet. This is what makes the current moment in artificial intelligence so strange. The hype is getting harder to believe at precisely the same time as the technology is getting harder to dismiss.
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