David Rotman

When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wanted to assess AI’s impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of business and technical uncertainties. So she started with what she calls a “remarkable fact” that is not in question: A handful of so-called hyperscalers are investing huge amounts of money to build AI data centers.

Whether it’s based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, an artificial-intelligence gold rush has started over the last several months to mine the anticipated business opportunities from generative AI models like ChatGPT. App developers, venture-backed startups, and some of the world’s largest corporations are all scrambling to make sense of the sensational text-generating bot released by OpenAI in November 2022. But while companies and executives see a clear chance to cash in, the likely impact of the technology on workers and the economy, on the whole, is far less obvious.