Below is an all-hands email from our CEO, Luis von Ahn – we are going to be AI-first.
Just like how betting on mobile in 2012 made all the difference, we’re making a similar call now. This time the platform shift is AI.
What doesn't change: We will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees.
And from The Harvard Gazette, February 14, 2025:
4 trends point to major change, say researchers who studied century of tech disruptions
The study measures more than 100 years of “occupational churn” — or
each profession’s share in the U.S. labor market — for a historical look
at technological disruption. It revealed a stretch of stability between
1990 and 2017 that runs counter to popular narratives about robots
stealing American jobs. But the research also uncovered a recent shift,
with the authors identifying several trends driven, at least partly, by
AI.
“We really thought the paper would say something like, ‘See, I told
you so. Things aren’t changing all that much,’” said Deming, the
Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard
Kennedy School and Faculty Dean of Kirkland House. “But when we got into
the data, we found the story was a bit more subtle — and more
interesting in some ways — than anything we expected.”
For years, Deming and Summers had talked about gauging occupational
churn in the U.S. labor market over time. “It would be a systematic way
to measure how much all these different types of technology have
affected work,” explained Deming, the paper’s lead author.
Labor market volatility over last century
Employment share by industry, 1880-2024. Source: “Technical Disruption in the Labor Market”
Last year the economists applied the metric with help from Kennedy
School predoctoral fellow Christopher Ong ’23, the paper’s third author.
Their findings, drawn from 124 years of U.S. Census data, originally
appeared in a volume published last fall by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Summers, a member of the OpenAI board of directors, shared further predictions in a live interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Summers was initially surprised by the level of volatility uncovered
in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s due to the rise of what are called
“breakthrough general-purpose technologies.” “But when I thought about
it, it wasn’t surprising,” said the Charles W. Eliot University
Professor and Frank and Denie Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at
Harvard Kennedy School. “It used to be that only a very limited number
of people used keyboards. Now everybody uses keyboards and there are
fewer people whose whole job is to use keyboards. That turned out to be a
very big structural change that the economy managed.”
The 2000s and 2010s were characterized by what Deming called “automation anxiety.” As evidence, he pointed to an influential study
from 2013 asserting that 47 percent of U.S. occupations were at
imminent risk of displacement by computers. But the occupational churn
metric showed the pace of disruption slowing by 1990 as the labor market
entered a stretch of low churn.
Then another surprise appeared in the data. “From 2019 onward,” Deming said, “it looks like things were changing quite a lot.”
“Everybody should be thinking about AI, no matter what they do for a living.”
Lawrence H. Summers, study co-author
Is AI a breakthrough technology along the lines of keyboards,
electricity, and computer-based manufacturing? The co-authors’ findings
led them to believe so. As evidence, they outline four emerging trends
in the U.S. job market.
The first concerns the end of what economists have termed job polarization — a barbell-shaped pattern, with the labor market growing at the top and bottom of the wage distribution.
What appeared more recently, the researchers found, is a one-sided
pattern favoring well-compensated employees with high levels of training
and skill. “The trend people were worried about in the 2000s was the downward ramp,”
Deming said. “That meant low-paid jobs were growing but middle- and
high-paid jobs were not. It’s only in the late 2010s that we see an
upward ramp, with mostly high-paid jobs that are growing.”
Another trend, related to the first, finds a recent skyrocketing of science, technology, engineering, and math jobs following a surprising dip
in the 2010s. The share of jobs in STEM — including software developers
and data analysts — grew from 6.5 percent in 2010 to nearly 10 percent
in 2024. “That doesn’t sound like a lot,” Deming said. “But it’s an
almost 50 percent increase.”....
