One of the co-founders of OpenAI has provoked controversy after creating – and then deleting – a list of jobs that are most vulnerable to being performed by artificial intelligence.
Andrej Karpathy, who helped found the ChatGPT creator in 2015, made the list of jobs by using AI to analyse data from every occupation on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Outlook Handbook, covering 143 million jobs across the US economy.
Each role was given a score between 0 and 10 to determine their “AI exposure”, with higher scores meaning they are more likely to either be replaced by AI, or at least incorporate it into workloads.
The data revealed that jobs with higher paying salaries had a worse average score, while people earning less than $35,000 had the lowest exposure.
Software developers, data scientists and financial analysts were among the roles with the highest exposure score, while construction workers, barbers and nursing assistants had very low scores.
After publishing his findings over the weekend, Mr Karpathy removed them from his website after claiming that people had misinterpreted the threat that AI poses.
“I thought the code/ data might be helpful to others to explore the BLS dataset visually, or colour it in different ways or with different prompts or add their own visualisations,” he wrote in a post to X.
“It’s been wildly misinterpreted (which I should have anticipated even despite the readme docs) so I took it down.”
He added: “The ‘exposure’ was scored by an LLM [large language model] based on how digital the job is. This has no bearing on what actually happens to these occupations, which has to do with demand elasticity and a lot more.”
His findings, which have since been restored, reflect similar conclusions from earlier reports about the impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce.
A 2023 study from OpenAI listed similar office jobs that had a high exposure to AI, while physical labour roles had the lowest exposure.
A more recent report from Claude creator Anthropic, published earlier this month, found that AI exposure was highest in better paid professions, however there is little real-world evidence to suggest AI displacement is occurring for those workers.
“We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022,” the report noted, “though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations.”
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