This is Planet Money from NPR.
It's been about six months since chat GPT was released to the public.
And basically, from the moment that happened, it felt like this seismic shift, because.
All of a sudden, people everywhere realized just how powerful artificial intelligence already is.
They began using this AI chatbot to do all sorts of things, to write raps, to take the bar exam, to identify bugs in computer code and fix them.
I mean, all that stuff is pretty cool.
But at the same time, there's been all this doom and gloom about AI.
Will it take our jobs?
Will it derail democracy?
Will it kill us all?
And these aren't, like, off the wall questions, like, serious people are asking these questions right now.
Yeah, it's kind of easy to fall into this, like, doom spiral these days.
But then a couple weeks ago, I saw something that gave me, like, this little glimmer of hope.
It was a study that looked at this customer service department of a big software company, and they started using chat GPT to help workers get better at their jobs.
And interestingly enough, it worked like it made the less skilled workers at this company much more productive.
And at the same time, it didn't do much for workers at the top.
So basically, AI narrowed the productivity gap between lower skilled workers and workers with more skills.
And, Greg, I think it's fair to say you read a lot of economic.
Studies, probably too many.
And yet you have been telling me, you've been telling all of us, that this finding felt really big to you because it's different from how we usually understand the way technology affects workers.