The discussion between OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji and Harvard Dean David Deming centered on findings from the largest study to date of ChatGPT usage. They highlighted how AI adoption is broad, fast, and practical, with strong evidence of democratization—closing demographic gaps, benefiting novices as much as experts, and being widely integrated into both personal and work contexts. They also emphasized the productivity and decision-support roles of ChatGPT, pointing toward shared societal benefits and new frameworks for understanding AI’s economic impact.

Event Replay: How People Really Use ChatGPT: The Who, the What, and the How of ChatGPT 

Mark Murray and Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji discussed how AI is reshaping the future of work, focusing on skills, job creation, disruption, and OpenAI’s new certifications and job platform. They highlighted AI’s potential to democratize opportunity, expand productivity, and support students, employers, and employees across industries. The conversation positioned OpenAI as both a researcher and a solution-builder, emphasizing training, accessibility, and economic opportunity.

Event Replay: Jobs in the Intelligence Age

The GitLab Foundation’s AI Demo Day highlighted how AI can drive economic opportunity, improve access to essential services, and empower workers. Speakers from GitLab Foundation, OpenAI, and two nonprofit leaders (mRelief and CareerVillage) emphasized using AI to address structural inequities, enhance productivity, and create pathways to upward mobility. They discussed leveraging AI for public benefit, workforce agility, and democratized access, aligning with OpenAI’s messaging on democratic AI, infrastructure investment, and shared benefits.

AI for Economic Opportunity Demo Day with OpenAI Academy and GitLab Foundation

The fireside chat with OpenAI Chief Economist, Ronnie Chatterji and Roderick Purwana, Managing Partner @ Each Venture in Jakarta emphasized the transformative economic potential of AI in emerging markets like Indonesia. Chatterji shared insights from his global and policy experience, highlighting the rapid growth of AI adoption among young Indonesians, the scalability of AI-enabled productivity, and the importance of local context in application development. The conversation underscored opportunities in education, workforce development, and AI infrastructure as foundational to unlocking shared benefits and economic growth.

Unlocking the Economic Impact of AI in Southeast Asia

<h1>About the Talk:</h1>In our <a href="https://forum.openai.com/home/events/virtual-event-careers-at-the-frontier-hiring-the-future-at-openai-61ecj84asr?agenda_day=685abd2011abb4475d113e0d&amp;agenda_track=685abd2111abb4475d113e22&amp;agenda_stage=685abd2011abb4475d113e13&amp;agenda_filter_view=stage&amp;agenda_view=list" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">first </a><a href="https://forum.openai.com/home/events/virtual-event-careers-at-the-frontier-hiring-the-future-at-openai-61ecj84asr?agenda_day=685abd2011abb4475d113e0d&amp;agenda_track=685abd2111abb4475d113e22&amp;agenda_stage=685abd2011abb4475d113e13&amp;agenda_filter_view=stage&amp;agenda_view=list" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Careers at the Frontier</a><a href="https://forum.openai.com/home/events/virtual-event-careers-at-the-frontier-hiring-the-future-at-openai-61ecj84asr?agenda_day=685abd2011abb4475d113e0d&amp;agenda_track=685abd2111abb4475d113e22&amp;agenda_stage=685abd2011abb4475d113e13&amp;agenda_filter_view=stage&amp;agenda_view=list" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> conversation</a>, OpenAI Head of Recruiting Joaquin Quiñonero Candela shared why the world’s top talent chooses OpenAI and what values guide our hiring.In this follow-up, we’ll take a closer look at the recruiting process in practice. You’ll hear directly from OpenAI recruiters about:<ol><li data-list="bullet">Top skills they look for in candidates, what it’s like to review thousands of applications, and what makes a candidate stand out.</li><li data-list="bullet">Behind-the-scenes stories about how OpenAI hired some of its most accomplished researchers.</li><li data-list="bullet">Concrete advice for future applicants, including crafting a clear resume, preparing for coding interviews, and demonstrating alignment with OpenAI’s mission.</li></ol>This session will move from principles to concrete examples of how OpenAI hires, and what sets successful candidates apart. <h1>About the Speakers:</h1><h3>Sarah Warkov, Sourcer @ OpenAI</h3>Sarah Warkov is a Sourcer at OpenAI, where she has spent the past two years building teams across Applied AI and Research. She’s helped recruit engineers behind ChatGPT, Sora, and Operator—often starting from the very first hire—and now supports hiring for OpenAI’s Robotics organization. Before OpenAI, she recruited technical talent at Google, Meta, Amazon, and in startups. Outside of work, she enjoys family time, long walks with her 90-pound dog, and binge-watching reality TV. <h2>Red Avila, Recruiter @ OpenAI</h2>Red Avila is a Recruiter at OpenAI, where he’s spent the past 5+ years building teams across Research, Engineering, Legal, Intelligence &amp; Investigations, HR, Recruiting (“R4R”), Sales, and more. He’s recruited talent behind our core research like GPT-3, Codex and the OpenAI API and even participated in <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">red-teaming models like GPT-4</a>. He enjoys being a “utility” talent partner, working across different domains and keeping his skills fresh. Outside of work, he spends time learning about wine, using ChatGPT to help him exercise, and keeping up on the latest sci-fi books and movies.

Virtual Event: Careers at The Frontier: Inside OpenAI's Recruiting Process

<h1>About the Talk:</h1>AI Literacy is not about replacing good teaching—it’s about enhancing it.Casey Cuny, 2024 California Teacher of the Year, with more than two decades of classroom and leadership experience, frames AI as both a challenge and an opportunity for educators. His core message is simple yet powerful: “Good teaching is still good teaching—AI just changes the tools.”AI has the potential to strengthen learning outcomes while easing teacher workload. As an engine for equity, it can expand access to tutoring, scaffolding, and creative tools that help close learning gaps. It enables teachers to personalize learning and boost engagement at a scale we have never seen before. It can also relieve the burden of routine tasks—emails, recommendation letters, lesson planning, grading—while serving as a creative partner for brainstorming lessons, designing projects, and generating prompts. Beyond the classroom, AI enhances professional development by acting as an on-demand thought partner, helping teachers refine lessons, explore strategies, and access personalized, just-in-time learning.In this session, participants will gain practical strategies for integrating AI into teaching, including how to:<ol><li data-list="bullet">Streamline teacher workload</li><li data-list="bullet">Use AI as a thought partner in lesson design</li><li data-list="bullet">Empower students with AI as a study buddy</li><li data-list="bullet">Use custom prompts to create personalized learning experiences for students</li><li data-list="bullet">Apply best practices for crafting prompts</li><li data-list="bullet">Implement guardrails for preventing misuse</li><li data-list="bullet">Reframe “cheating” in the age of AI</li><li data-list="bullet">Raise expectations for student learning by shifting from rote tasks to deeper inquiry</li><li data-list="bullet">How Deep Research changes the game for lesson design and curating resources</li></ol>By the end of this talk, educators will leave with concrete tools, insights, and an inspiring vision for how AI can amplify—not replace—the heart of good teaching. <h1>About the Speaker:</h1>Casey Cuny is the 2024 California Teacher of the Year. Cuny teaches 10th grade honors English and Senior mythology and folklore at Valencia High School in Santa Clarita, California. He serves as English Department Chair and the school’s Instructional Coach. He also teaches at National University in the Masters of Education program working with teachers from all over the country, and he was recently awarded the 2025 National University Academic Excellence Delphi Award. He is also currently working with ASU to develop their new California Teacher Credential program.&nbsp;He strives to create an inclusive environment for his students, and to champion their growth as individuals. He uses the synergy of social, emotional, and academic intelligence to push students to levels of rigor not possible without this concerted approach.

Virtual Event: California Teacher of the Year Uses AI to Make Good Teaching Even Better

<h1>About the Talk:</h1>Many exciting and wonderful things are happening in AI all the time — but how can we understand the bigger picture? Why are these breakthroughs happening now, and what core research is driving them?In this talk, OpenAI Research Scientist Łukasz Kaiser presents a simple model for thinking about progress: how we are making increasingly computationally powerful systems more learnable. Like any model, it has its flaws, but it has guided Łukasz from co-authoring the Transformer architecture in Attention Is All You Need (2017), to advancing model-based reinforcement learning for Atari (2019), and most recently to co-developing contemporary reasoning models at OpenAI.Lukasz will share how this framework helps him organize his thinking and research about AI — and what it may mean for the future.Don’t miss the opportunity to learn alongside one of the most influential AI research scientists of our time as he explores how OpenAI is building tools to help humanity solve its hardest problems. <h1>About the Speakers:</h1><h2>Lukasz Kaiser </h2>Lukasz is a deep learning researcher at OpenAI and was previously part of the Google Brain team. He works on fundamental aspects of deep learning and natural language processing. He has co-invented Transformers, reasoning models and other neural sequence models and co-authored the TensorFlow system and the Tensor2Tensor and Trax libraries. Before working on machine learning, Lukasz was a tenured researcher at University Paris Diderot and worked on logic and automata theory. He received his PhD from RWTH Aachen University in 2008 and his MSc from the University of Wroclaw, PolandNotable Research:&nbsp;Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al. 2017) — the original Transformer paper<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> </a><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">arXiv</a><a href="https://research.google/blog/transformer-a-novel-neural-network-architecture-for-language-understanding/?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google Research</a>Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for atari (Kaiser, Babaeizadeh, Milos, Osinski et al. 2019) <a href="https://scholar.google.com.sg/citations?view_op=view_citation&amp;hl=en&amp;user=JWmiQR0AAAAJ&amp;citation_for_view=JWmiQR0AAAAJ:nb7KW1ujOQ8C" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">arXivGoogle Research</a>Reformer: The Efficient Transformer (Kitaev, Kaiser &amp; Levskaya, 2020) — an efficient long-sequence Transformer variant<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04451?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> </a><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04451?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">arXiv</a>Image Transformer (Parmar, Vaswani, Uszkoreit, Kaiser, Shazeer, Ku, Tran, 2018) — applying the Transformer architecture to image generation<a href="https://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/parmar18a.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> </a><a href="https://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/parmar18a.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Proceedings of Machine Learning Research</a><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05751?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">arXiv</a>Can Active Memory Replace Attention? (Kaiser &amp; Bengio, NeurIPS 2016) — exploring alternatives to attention mechanisms in neural sequence models<a href="https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6295-can-active-memory-replace-attention?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> </a><a href="https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6295-can-active-memory-replace-attention?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NeurIPS Papers</a> <h2>Natalie Cone</h2>Natalie Cone leads OpenAI’s interdisciplinary community, the Forum, a community designed to unite thoughtful contributors from a diverse array of backgrounds, skill sets, and domain expertise to enable discourse related to the intersection of AI and an array of academic, professional, and societal domains. Before joining OpenAI, Natalie managed and stewarded Scale’s ML/AI community of practice. She has a background in the Arts, with a degree in History of Art from UC, Berkeley, and has served as Director of Operations and Programs, as well as on the board of directors for the radical performing arts center, CounterPulse, and led visitor experience at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Virtual Event: Learning Powerful Models: From Transformers to Reasoners and Beyond

<h3>About the Talk:</h3>As part of the <a href="https://forum.openai.com/home/collections/the-future-of-work-2025-06-24" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Forum’s Future of Work series</a>, Dr. Ronnie Chatterji, (Chief Economist at OpenAI), welcomes David J. Deming, (Danoff Dean of Harvard College and Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School), for a conversation on how AI is reshaping skills, education, and jobs.They will share new findings about how ChatGPT is being used to solve real-world problems—and what those patterns reveal about the future of work. <h1>About the Speakers:</h1><h3>David J. Deming, Dean @ Harvard College </h3>David J. Deming is the Danoff Dean of Harvard College, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Professor in the Harvard Economics Department. He also served as Academic Dean of HKS from 2021 to 2024.His research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He serves as a Principal Investigator—alongside Raj Chetty and John Friedman—at the <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/climb/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CLIMB Initiative</a>, an organization devoted to studying and improving the role of higher education in social mobility. He is also one of the faculty leads of the <a href="https://www.pw.hks.harvard.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Project on Workforce</a>, a cross-Harvard initiative spanning HKS, HBS, and HGSE that concentrates on the future of work.Together with Ben Weidmann, he recently co-founded the <a href="https://www.skillslab.dev/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Skills Lab</a>, which develops performance-based measures of “soft” skills such as teamwork and decision-making.In 2018, he received the <a href="https://www.appam.org/about-appam/awards/david-n-kershaw-award/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David N. Kershaw Prize</a> for distinguished contributions to public policy and management granted to individuals under the age of 40. In 2022, he was awarded the <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/721003" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sherwin Rosen Prize</a> for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics.His writing appears semi-regularly in The New York Times and, more recently, The Atlantic. He also maintains his newsletter at Forked Lightning. <h3>Ronnie Chatterji, Chief Economist @ OpenAI</h3>Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, Ph.D., is OpenAI’s first Chief Economist. He is also the Mark Burgess &amp; Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor at Duke University, working at the intersection of academia, policy, and business. He served in the Biden Administration as White House CHIPS coordinator and Acting Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, shaping industrial policy, manufacturing, and supply chains. Before that, he was Chief Economist at the Department of Commerce and a Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He is on leave as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and previously taught at Harvard Business School. Earlier in his career, he worked at Goldman Sachs and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Chatterji holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.

Virtual Event: How People Really Use ChatGPT: The Who, the What, and the How of ChatGPT

<h1>About the Talk:</h1>How AI creates more jobs, better work, and new careers.AI isn’t just changing the way we work — it’s reshaping the jobs landscape itself. Despite common concerns, early evidence suggests AI may reshape jobs as much as it replaces them — and with the right skills and safeguards, it can open more doors than it closes.In this Forum session, OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji will discuss AI can raise productivity and wages while broadening access to good jobs — if we act with ambition and care. This conversation links the rooms where rules are written, the labs where technology is built, and the workplaces where people earn a living to show how AI can become a pathway to new opportunities for people everywhere. <h1>About the Speakers:</h1><h3>Ronnie Chatterji, Chief Economist @ OpenAI</h3>Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, Ph.D., is OpenAI’s first Chief Economist. He is also the Mark Burgess &amp; Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor at Duke University, working at the intersection of academia, policy, and business. He served in the Biden Administration as White House CHIPS coordinator and Acting Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, shaping industrial policy, manufacturing, and supply chains. Before that, he was Chief Economist at the Department of Commerce and a Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He is on leave as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and previously taught at Harvard Business School. Earlier in his career, he worked at Goldman Sachs and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Chatterji holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.<h3>Mark Murray, Editorial Director @ OpenAI</h3>Mark Murray is an Editorial Director at OpenAI, bringing nearly three decades of experience covering American politics as a veteran editor, reporter, and storyteller. Before joining OpenAI, he spent 21 years at NBC News, where he served as Senior Political Editor. In that role, he directed the network’s political coverage, managed NBC’s Political Unit, oversaw its extensive polling operation, and wrote the lead stories on election results and public opinion trends.A trusted voice in political journalism, Mark has reported on every U.S. presidential election since 2000, appearing regularly on television, radio, podcasts, and digital platforms to break down polling data and explain the dynamics shaping American politics. Earlier in his career, he served as Deputy Political Director, Off-Air Political Reporter, and writer at National Journal, where he covered Congress, immigration, labor, and education policy.Throughout his 27-year career, Mark has been recognized for his ability to translate complex political developments into clear, accessible narratives. Known as a collaborative leader and skilled communicator, he has guided teams of reporters and researchers while providing audiences with thoughtful analysis across media.

Virtual Event: Jobs in the Intelligence Age

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