The wheel, electricity and the computer are among some two dozen general purpose technologies, aka GPTs, that have greatly transformed human economies and societies. Is it just a coincidence that OpenAI's GPT shares this initialism? In the new paper GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models, a research team from OpenAI, OpenResearch, and the University of Pennsylvania investigates the potential impact of LLMs like GPT on the US labour market, shedding light on the economic, social, and policy implications. The "GPT" in ChatGPT stands for generative pretrained transformer, an LLM architecture with game-changing abilities across a variety of generative tasks. Amid the recent public fascination with ChatGPT, however, concerns are emerging -- as people wonder how such models could impact their workplaces and to what extent they might replace human workers.

We investigate the potential implications of Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models and related technologies on the U.S. labor market. Using a new rubric, we assess occupations based on their correspondence with GPT capabilities, incorporating both human expertise and classifications from GPT-4. Our findings indicate that approximately 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 may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. Notably, the impact is not limited to industries with higher recent productivity growth. We conclude that Generative Pre-trained Transformers exhibit characteristics of general-purpose technologies (GPTs), suggesting that as these models could have notable economic, social, and policy implications.