But OpenAI’s chief economist said AI will soon help people with the jobs they do at home.
Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji said AI will help save time on household chores, adding that the technology will assist millions of people in ways that traditional economic statistics do not cover, the Financial Times reported Wednesday (Jan. 8).
“This is something people aren’t necessarily thinking about when they think about the impact of AI,” he said, per the report. “Taking care of those tasks that would have taken us a long time.”
The argument came amid debate about whether generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT will lead to the sweeping gains in productivity Silicon Valley has promised, the report said. At the same time, others warn that AI could usher in job losses.
OpenAI has contended the technology is transformative in other ways that are difficult to gauge, with CEO Sam Altman saying on “The Tonight Show” last month that he could not “imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.”
Research from OpenAI rival Anthropic suggested that people using its Claude chatbot for guidance in food preparation sped up the process by 75%, according to the report.
Chatterji said he wants to find “new ways to measure human value,” with a special emphasis on how workers collaborate, and on measuring domestic labor, per the report.
“Whether it’s caring for children or doing household chores, these are things that need to get done,” Chatterji said, according to the report.
Chatterji’s department’s work has been criticized for selective research and for publishing work that supports OpenAI’s technology, the report said.
The report followed findings published by OpenAI this week showing that 40 million people use ChatGPT each day for health-related questions, with health prompts now making up more than 5% of all messages sent to ChatGPT worldwide. Among the platform’s roughly 800 million weekly users, about 200 million engage with health topics at least once per week.
Meanwhile, the PYMNTS Intelligence report “How AI Becomes the Place Consumers Start Everything” found that more than 60% of consumers in the United States used a dedicated AI platform in the last year.
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