Andrej Karpathy used AI to gauge which U.S. professions are most vulnerable to the technology amid growing fears that a jobs apocalypse may be headed for the economy.
Over the weekend, the OpenAI cofounder and former director of AI at Tesla posted a graphic showing how susceptible every occupation is to Al and automation, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Different jobs received scores on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being most exposed.
While the overall weighted exposure was 4.9, Karpathy’s data also showed that professions earning more than $100,000 a year had the worst average score (6.7), while the those earning less than $35,000 had the lowest exposure (3.4).
His chart quickly drew attention online, with many predicting doom for white-collar workers. But Karpathy soon removed the data.
“This was a saturday morning 2 hour vibe coded project inspired by a book I’m reading,” he explained on X on Sunday morning. “I thought the code/data might be helpful to others to explore the BLS dataset visually, or color it in different ways or with different prompts or add their own visualizations. It’s been wildly misinterpreted (which I should have anticipated even despite the readme docs) so I took it down.”
He didn’t respond to questions about how it’s been misinterpreted and what the correct interpretation should be.
Still, an archived version of the chart may not be much of a shocker as it echoes what others have been saying about how AI could shape the U.S. labor market.
For example, software developers, computer programmers, database administrators, data scientists, mathematicians, financial analysts, paralegals, writers, editors, graphic designers, and market researchers got scores of 9.
That’s as sophisticated AI tools are increasingly being used to crunch numbers and produce content, performing tasks in minutes that used to require knowledge workers hours, days, or even weeks to do.
While AI is seen as a…