You know the deal: AI is the villain, the thing that all the college kids are booing at commencement speech, the bringer of destruction to the labor market. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the anxiety has mounted along with the predictions of the demise of white-collar work.
But nearly four years later, Goldman Sachs economists have a surprising update. The mismatch between workers and available jobs—a key barometer of labor market stress—has actually improved since that moment, falling below its pre-pandemic level. The traffic jam, in other words, is clearing.
The reason, paradoxically, is AI itself.
A tale of two studies
The Goldman finding doesn’t go unchallenged. Economists at the New York Fed published their own analysis the same day, concluding that overall AI exposure shows little link to declining job postings—and the drop in postings for high-exposure roles actually predated ChatGPT entirely. The two camps aren’t so much contradicting each other as standing at different points on the same highway, describing what kind of snarl they see.
