Editor’s note: Jeremy Korst is president of GBK Collective, leading the company’s strategic marketing and insights practice.
While there’s been chatter about AI’s potential for years now, the recent launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has generated significant interest and is sparking countless predictions on how AI may impact our lives and reshape industries. While its “large language model” and “generative AI” technologies seem seductively intelligent and almost sentient on some occasions, it also raises concerns about accuracy, privacy, bias and ethical implications – as well as potential implications for the world of work.
Wharton Professor Christian Terwiesch recently put ChatGPT to the test, literally – asking it to complete the final exam for his MBA Operational Management course – and ultimately gave it a passing grade. While noting certain limitations, he found that the AI did an excellent job addressing MBA-level operations management and process analysis questions, including those that are based on case studies. He reports that “ChatGPT has shown a remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general, and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers and consultants.”
Terwiesch is joined by others who are trying to get a handle on how many and which jobs may be most impacted by this innovative technology. A recent report by Goldman Sachs suggests that nearly 300 million jobs across the U.S. and Europe could be exposed to AI automation. As such, many are trying to understand how many and which jobs may be most impacted by this innovative technology.
A recent working paper by a team from OpenAI, OpenResearch and the University of Pennsylvania finds that “around 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers...