[FOR INTERNAL REVIEW] Ronnie Chatterji - How the Labor Market Looks from Inside Open AI

What does it look like to do economics from inside the AI revolution with access to data nobody else has, and questions nobody has figured out how to answer yet?

In this episode, Ben sits down with Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist at OpenAI, to pull back the curtain on how economic research actually gets done at a frontier AI lab.

Topics covered:

• Why the right time horizon for AI economics is a mix of real-time, medium-term, and scenario planning
• Why you can't afford to be late to recursive self-improvement even when it feels far away
• What OpenAI's own labor data is showing
• The four-category job framework: which roles are at risk, which will be reorganized, which will expand as prices fall, and which are largely insulated
• The Codex paper: what OpenAI's internal data on agentic coding tool adoption reveals about how long it takes different functions to catch up with one another
• Extensive vs. intensive margin: why 2025 was about getting firms to adopt AI at all, and why 2026 is about measuring how deeply they're actually using it
• AI and entrepreneurship: whether the falling cost of starting a business is producing more solo firms, thicker startup markets, or just more noise
• Whether AI favors small firms that can now punch above their weight, or large firms with the data, governance, and training capacity to go deeper
• B2B Signals: what OpenAI's enterprise data set reveals about the gap between power users and median users
• The globalization of AI: which countries are growing fastest in AI usage

About Ronnie Chatterji: Ronnie Chatterji is the chief economist at OpenAI, where he leads research on AI's impact on jobs, growth, and enterprise. He previously served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce and as a professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. His research spans entrepreneurship, innovation, and the economics of technology adoption.

Check out Ronnie's research at openai.com/signals

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