OpenAI claims AI saves workers up to an hour per day

OpenAI says AI is saving its workers between 40 and 60 minutes per day.

The ChatGPT maker conducted a survey of 9,000 workers across 100 companies who had been using AI tools for three to four weeks. Overall, OpenAI says three-quarters of employees who use AI said it’s improved either the speed or quality of their work.

Naturally, OpenAI is bullish about these findings. For instance, Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist, told Bloomberg that three out of four people are now saying they can do things they couldn’t before thanks to AI. “This is often missed in the conversation about AI and work,” he said.

However, this report only accounts for one part of the larger AI conversation. First off, this report — and other similarly glowing ones from rival AI makers like Antrophic — aren’t peer-reviewed, as noted by Bloomberg. On top of that, they’re only focused on enterprise.

But even besides all of that, this data seems far from conclusive. For instance, asking people who had only been using AI for three to four weeks is pretty limited. Perhaps they did indeed have a good experience early on, but it’s unclear whether that continued beyond that short period.

There’s also the question of what might be lost in exchange for “getting back” as much as an hour of time. After all, it’s been well-documented how AI can create “hallucinations,” which is another way of saying incorrect or misleading results. Therefore, while OpenAI workers might think they’re being more efficient, it’s possible that the AI still produces flawed solutions.

Look no further than a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study from earlier this year that found that 95 per cent of organizations found zero return on investment, despite tens of billions being pumped into this sector. That said, the study found that companies that bought AI tools had more success than those that built them internally.

And in other cases, AI can prove a hindrance. Per an October Business Insider report, employees at video game giant Electronic Arts (EA) say they’ve had to deal with AI yielding flawed code and other hallucinations, which, of course, is counterproductive when talking about “saving time.”

The employees also expressed concerns about job loss due to AI, with one cited laid-off EA-owned Respawn senior quality-assurance worker suspected was at least partially to blame for 100 job cuts at the Apex Legends maker. He noted that EA was able to use AI to conduct a key part of his job: reviewing and summarizing feedback from play testers. And in a creative space like gaming, there’s no guarantee that generative AI will ethically source the materials it produces.

It remains to be seen what other data companies like OpenAI will tout as part of their grand proclamations about how “AI is the future.”

Source: OpenAI Via: Bloomberg