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

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

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:

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

Let’s get into it.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about: