DALL-E/Every illustration.

Does OpenAI’s Deep Research Put Me Out of a Job?

An investigation into a Sam Altman tweet

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The pending unemployment of millions is a casual thing to announce with a tweet, but such is the age we live in. Last week, Sam Altman posted that according to his “very approximate vibe,” OpenAI’s new product deep research could “do a single-digit percentage of all economically valuable tasks in the world.” If you assume that each task represents a job, and that “single-digit” means 5 percent, then Altman is talking about the replacement of 8.2 million workers in the United States with last week’s announcement. 

If he’s right, we could soon start seeing mass layoffs and reduced hiring for anyone whose job involves doing research. As one of the people whose livelihood is directly threatened by this product, I thought this claim was worth stress-testing.

Deep research takes a question you have and scours the internet to answer it via a research report. It is one of the first AI agent products that 1) mostly works and 2) is available for ChatGPT’s hundreds of millions of users to purchase. As such, the discussion around the impact of AI employment just got less theoretical and more urgent.

The grand promise of AI is that it will automate the majority of existing knowledge work. This sounds cool! It also sounds like breadlines! My personal definition of knowledge work is any task that requires a keyboard—which is quite a lot of what we all do. To figure out if we will see a disruption of “single-digit percentage of all economically valuable tasks,” we need to start by attempting to answer the following questions:

  1. Has any other technology reached similar levels of disruption? 
  2. Does deep research have the potential to do that for knowledge work?
  3. Should the extremely handsome writer of this article prepare to move back to the farm?

Let’s get into it. 

What is technology anyway?

The short answer to whether other technologies have replaced labor like Altman claims is no. Unfortunately, the longer answer is probably yes. Allow me to explain. 

When we talk about “technology,” what we typically mean is some application of scientific knowledge that allows humans to perform new tasks or makes old ones easier. The more fundamental technologies, like electricity, underpin multiple technological applications. For example, in the hands of the right inventor, electricity can be applied to doing laundry, automating a large part of that task for busy parents. 

The key point here is that applications disrupt tasks, while fundamental technologies remake economies. 

Perhaps no situation is more instructive than the cotton industry in the 1780s through the 1890s in the U.K. In the beginning, the industry was reliant on a highly skilled labor force of handloom weavers who were crucial to the process of turning cotton into textiles. As mechanized looms became popular during this period, these workers slowly disappeared. 

On one hand, this is a story of technology's might. The cotton industry was initially small—about 1 percent of British GDP in the 1780s—and rose to 7–8 percent in 1813. Imports of cotton matched that increase, jumping from 26 million pounds to 300 million pounds in 1831-1835. Despite this growth, real wages for cotton weavers peaked in the early 1800s and plummeted to a quarter of that level by 1830.

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Comments

Arushi Khosla 5 months ago

Excellent piece, she wrote about an analysis of her own demise.
The closing sentence hit the mark -- most of my smartest friends all got started in what I now think of as a research factory. Sitting in the data and wading through it all manually WAS laborious but critical. Yeah, that's a comfort for the longevity of the careers of those of us in it, but kind of depressing for any new grads. Don't have particularly valuable advice for them atm.

Brad Z. 5 months ago

maybe I'm a naive optimist but AI’s impact on knowledge work always seems stuck in an old paradigm—one where AI is just a force for wage compression/worker displacement...that’s a scarcity mindset. to me, what’s actually happening is the rise of human-automatronic jobs (*in silico vibes), roles that weren’t even conceivable until now. i wish we were less into who gets replaced and more into what gets created. Idk. the human-AI interface isn’t a zero-sum fight over tasks, rather than(maybe) a new economic terrain where human capital is digitized, expanded, and integrated into some crazy-ass cybernetic workflows. LFG! Also, let me say it: work isn’t disappearing; it’s evolving into something post-scarcity, where intelligence is abundant. Perhaps it isn't even about protecting wages more than it’s about unlocking whole new strata of economic agency through synthetic labor markets.. human-aligned automation, etc. For transparency, how come we're not minting jobs instead of always 'losing' them. Thanks for letting me riff. Please write more about this topic. Accelerate.