As we enter this technological new era, there are mounting fears that the human race is on borrowed time. While Homo sapiens might've been top of the food chain for the past 300,000 years, it appears that we could soon be replaced by the very machines we've created.
While we're not yet in the danger zone of Skynet wiping us out, as in the Terminator movies, there are continued concerns that the ever-evolving realm of artificial intelligence will leave us without jobs.
Elon Musk has championed the mythical universal high income, and while Bill Gates has predicted a two-day working week, there are obvious questions about what we're supposed to do without our traditional jobs.
After Microsoft claimed that there are 40 jobs safe from AI, and AI 'Godfather' Geoffrey Hinton said that plumbers are the only job that's secure, OpenAI has produced its own controversial list that reveals which of us could soon be looking for alternative employment.
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The likes of ChatGPT and Grok are emerging as the frontrunners in the AI scene, but surprising no one, the former is already pushing some of us flesh and blood humans toward unemployment.
As reported by Futurism, OpenAI has unveiled a 'GDPval' evaluation that has measured how ChatGPT performs on “economically valuable, real-world tasks across 44 occupations."
An accompanying blog post explains how the AI giant wants to "transparently communicate progress on how AI models can help people in the real world." It gets its name from the concept of using Gross Domestic Product "as a key economic indicator," looking at how AI could impact industries that contribute to the GDP.
Seemingly as a middle finger to those who don't think AI could be valuable in the workplace, OpenAI says that current models are already "approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts."
The 44 occupations in danger come from a variety of industries that range from government to manufacturing. Everyone from private detectives to pharmacists, concierges to financial advisors are at risk. It's no surprise to see customer service representatives here, especially as so many have already been automated, and it's increasingly hard to get through to a human.
While OpenAI tiptoes around the idea of AI making humans completely obsolete, it said this new tech will support people in the work they do every day." Ironically, Anthropic's rival Claude Opus 4.1 was dubbed the 'best performing model' after being graded across 220 tasks, with OpenAI's GPT-5 coming in second as it “excelled in particular on accuracy."
The all-powerful GPT-5-high, was also “rated as better than or on par with the deliverables from industry experts” around 40% of the time. Considering GPT-4o was only released just over a year ago and only scored 13.7%, it shows how fast things are moving.
Even if OpenAI stops short of pitching ChatGPT as a humanoid replacement for us, the post concludes by saying: "Early GDPval results show that models can already take on some repetitive, well-specified tasks faster and at lower cost than experts.
"However, most jobs are more than just a collection of tasks that can be written down.”