Ronnie Chatterji - How The Labor Market Looks From Inside Open AI

Lots of people have opinions about what AI will do to jobs and growth. My guest today is the one building a research agenda to find out. Ronnie Chatterjee is the chief economist at OpenAI and one of the pioneers of the economics of AI. We get into what AI means today and what that means for workers and policy.

Here's our talk.

Welcome to the Economics of Worth. I'm excited to welcome Ronnie Chatterjee, Chief Economist at OpenAI. Maybe you've heard of it. Ronnie, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks so much for having me, Ben. It's exciting to be here.

For sure. So you've got the coolest job in the world, I think. How do you set a research agenda for a company like OpenAI? How do you decide what not to work on?

It's a great question, and I really do agree that I have the coolest job in the world. I recently wrote my first Substack post out of a series that we're coming out with that said I think I have the coolest job. I like it, by the way, and

welcome to Substack. Better than Twitter.

Thank you. No, no, I enjoy the long form part of it. It's also why I enjoy the podcast. I did describe it as the coolest job in the world. And I don't know if it would be true for everybody, but for people like you and I who are economists interested in new technologies and how they impact society and the economy as a whole, I couldn't think of a cooler job in the world. And one of the biggest challenges in the job is setting a research agenda. And so when I started this job about two years ago, There really wasn't a playbook in an AI lab for a chief economist. I was the first one. There were chief economists at other tech companies, though, and I sought them out. I asked them how they prioritize, how they built their team. Who did you talk to? I talked to everyone from Susan Athey to folks who had worked at Google, people like Jed Kolko, who'd done stuff at Indeed, and just a great network of folks across many, many different companies. I also, when I had been chief economist at the Commerce Department in a different kind of role inside government, I talked to a lot of chief economists at banks and manufacturing firms. And so I had a little bit of sense of how we might set this up. But a lot of it was new, Ben. I mean, just being in the middle of this AI revolution, a lot of the assumptions that might have guided my thinking in the past went out the window. And I needed to kind of rewrite the script in terms of what we were doing. I'll tell you a couple of things that guided me. I mean, one was, what are the questions I'm getting asked? I mean, as an economist, I really believe that Some of the best research questions and getting a sense of the vibes come from reading the newspaper and thinking about what people are talking about on the front pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Economist magazine. These are some of the biggest issues. I also think you can do a straw poll at your kid's soccer game and see what people are asking you about. And I realized early on people were going to ask me about questions around labor, which I know you've made a lot of big contributions, as has Rebellio. And they were going to ask me about