The employment rate for 22- to 25-year-olds has fallen by 2.7% overall since ChatGPT became widespread, according to Stanford University analysis of US wage and jobs data – but in sectors most exposed to artificial intelligence, the decline is far steeper. In finance, software and creative industries, young workers have seen a 12.8% drop in employment. The findings add weight to warnings from Nobel prize-winning economists, who recently said the world “must act now” to ensure AI leads to rising living standards rather than large-scale job displacement. London businesses, meanwhile, have reported struggling to find the skills they need as AI disrupts the jobs market.
The data, covering four years of employment outcomes, tracks the impact of large language models (LLMs) – the technology behind ChatGPT. Three years ago, these models could only reliably complete tasks that took humans seconds or minutes. Now they can handle fairly complex work that takes about an hour, such as finding problems in a cryptocurrency contract or even developing and streamlining the model itself – work that would take a human several hours. The latest generation of models could start to entirely develop themselves within the next year, the BBC reports.
“Young workers aged 22-25 face 12.8% employment hit in finance, software, creative sectors due to AI, Stanford data shows.”
Not all economists agree that AI is solely responsible for the employment shift. Some argue that other factors, such as interest rate rises, could explain the trend. But the pattern is clear: online job postings have also been affected since the launch of ChatGPT and other LLMs. “Flat is the new up,” investors are told, as they question whether new roles should be filled by human recruits or by armies of “AI Agents” – virtual workers capable of handling relatively skilled tasks. If even half the claims made by AI companies prove true, the impact will be felt across sectors and individual careers, and perhaps sooner than we think.