Evaluating the impact of AI on the labor market: Current state of affairs (www.theregister.com)

Yale’s Budget Lab economists examined U.S. employment data since ChatGPT’s November 2022 debut and report "the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago." In short: despite high-profile warnings from AI leaders and companies framing layoffs as AI-driven, the study finds little evidence that generative AI has so far reduced aggregate demand for cognitive labor. The researchers place their results alongside similar findings from the ILO and country-level analyses (Denmark), which show modest or offsetting effects, while noting one Stanford study that finds a 13% relative employment decline for recent grads in AI‑exposed roles. The significance for the AI/ML community is twofold: first, current generative models have not yet triggered large-scale automation-driven job losses, suggesting adoption, integration, and complementary labor dynamics are still evolving; second, observed layoffs at some firms may reflect cost-cutting, outsourcing, or balance-sheet moves tied to cloud and data‑center investments rather than straightforward automation. Technically, this implies short-term productivity gains from AI may be creating new demand even as certain tasks are automated, and that labor-market impacts will depend on adoption speed, task exposure, and firm-level strategy rather than model capability alone.