Early MIT research shows ‘Industrial Revolution-level large’ leap for workers using ChatGPT, generative AI
It’s early days in the rise of generative AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and many in the market remain unconvinced of how it will play out for the economy and society, if amazed at its tricks.
Warren Buffett said in a recent interview with Becky Quick on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that while ChatGPT did “wonderful things” writing a song for him in Spanish, and that “it’s an incredible technological advance in terms of showing what we can do,” he wasn’t convinced about the ultimate outcomes for the world. “I think this is extraordinary but I don’t know if it’s beneficial,” he said.
He did say the time-saving component of the tech is among the things that struck him.
“It can tell you that it’s read every book, every legal opinion. I mean, the amount of time it could save you, if you were doing all kinds of things, is unbelievable,” Buffett said.
That’s where CEOs in the generative AI space are focused.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in an interview after being named the No. 1 company on the 2023 CNBC Disruptor list this year that the legal profession is a good example.
“What we’re hearing from customers using our API for legal companies is that it is totally transforming the way they work and the efficiency that any one lawyer can achieve and the accuracy, freeing people up to do more of what they do really well, and having this new tool to sort of give them as much leverage as possible,” Altman said.
That backs up what tech executives working directly with legal firms have previously told CNBC, with one saying of his legal and accounting firm clients that the sentiment right now is not that AI replaces lawyers, but “lawyers using AI are gonna replace lawyers. … Those professionals are going to be more effective, more efficient, they’ll be able to do more,” he said.
“That is a pattern we’re seeing again and again in many industries, and I’m super excited about it,” Altman said. “I do think it will touch almost everything.”
There isn’t much research yet to support these contentions, but early data does support the anecdotal evidence. A study released by MIT researchers in March showed that workers were 37% more efficient using ChatGPT.
Aidan Gomez, CEO of generative AI startup Cohere, which ranked No. 44 on this year’s Disruptor 50 list, pointed to that MIT study in a CNBC interview on Tuesday, saying, “The results are amazing,” he said. “That’s Industrial Revolution-level large. What the steam engine did for mechanical work, mechanical labor, this technology is going to do for intellectual labor.”
Gomez stressed in his comments to CNBC that the research had not yet been peer-reviewed. The authors of the MIT research, Whitney Zhang and Shakked Noy, were unable to comment due to the research currently being in the process of submission to a journal for peer review and publication.
Generative AI already begun to ‘noticeably impact workers’
Cohere’s platform lets developers and businesses of all sizes — even those without expertise in machine learning — integrate AI features like copywriting, search, conversational AI, summarization or content moderation in their company’s mobile app or service platform. Cohere works with AI customer service tech vendor LivePerson and has cloud deals with Google, Amazon Web Services and Oracle. Salesforce is an investor in the company, one of the first investments the customer relationship management tech giant made this year in a new AI fund. Gomez, along with co-founder Nick Frosst, came from Google Brain, an exploratory deep learning artificial intelligence team that’s now part of Google Research. While at Alphabet‘s Google, Gomez and other researchers helped to develop a new method of natural language processing — transformers — that enable systems to grasp a word’s context more accurately.
Comments like Gomez’s have contributed to the debate about whether AI replaces human labor or augments it. In sectors such as education, those fears are already running high. Gomez, in keeping with the outlook from most AI executives, is sticking to the “augmentative” script.
“What you’re going to see is humans are going to become ten times more effective at what they do,” he said.
He did say we should be wary of companies pointing to AI as the reason for layoffs in the future. He expects that excuse to be made.
But workers also have an advantage, for now, Gomez said: the time it will take to integrate AI technology into the existing technology stack.
“The reality is this will be a slow process over the next half-decade and there will be time to adjust, and change your own job,” he said. “And frankly, you’re going to love it.”
His comments made clear that workers better get used to it.
“We’re pre the real deployment, so I think simmering underneath the water is all this work going on to just transform every product, every single company.”
The MIT study provided more of a mixed assessment of the eventual outcomes for workers and the labor market. The increases in productivity among college-educated professionals performing mid-level professional writing tasks were qualified as “substantial,” and the study showed these workers executed tasks “significantly faster.” Initially low-performing workers, meanwhile, saw output increase and time on task decrease. But the MIT researchers weren’t sure that meant the outlook was good for preserving jobs.
“The experimental evidence suggests that ChatGPT largely substitutes for worker effort rather than complementing workers’ skills, potentially causing a decrease in demand for workers, with adverse distributional effects as capital owners gain at the expense of workers,” they wrote.
The researchers also pointed to limitations in their study. For one, the tasks were “relatively short, self-contained, and lack a dimension of context-specific knowledge, which may inflate our estimates of ChatGPT’s usefulness.” They could not draw conclusions about overall job satisfaction from the results, and, in capturing “only direct, immediate effects of ChatGPT on the selected occupations” they cannot account for many other factors that will weigh in labor markets and production systems as they adapt to new technologies like ChatGPT, or how AI will influence each occupation, task, and skill level.
The only conclusion they made with confidence in their paper: “For now, the evidence we provide suggests that generative AI technologies will — and have already begun — to noticeably impact workers.”
Watch the full CNBC Disruptor 50 interview above for more of this leading generative AI CEO’s views on how the next few years of work will play out.
Hinge Health’s TrueMotion feature.
Courtesy: Hinge Health
Digital physical therapy startup Hinge Health is gearing up to file for an initial public offering, potentially as soon as next week, CNBC has learned.
Hinge Health helps patients with musculoskeletal injuries ranging from minor sprains to chronic pain recover from the comfort of their own homes. Its IPO has been a highly-anticipated exit within the battered digital health sector, which has been reeling from the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The IPO could happen as early as April, but timelines might still change due to uncertainty around tariffs, according to a person familiar with the matter. Hinge Health, which contracts with employers, generated $390 million in revenue in 2024, had $45 million in free cash flow and hit gross margins of about 78%, the person said.
The San Francisco startup has raised more than $1 billion from investors like Tiger Global and Coatue Management. Hinge Health had a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. Physical therapy is estimated to be a roughly $70 billion market by the end of the decade.
A spokesperson for Hinge Health declined to comment.
Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez and Executive Chairman Gabriel Mecklenburg co-founded the company in 2014 after they were frustrated by their own experiences with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.
Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso that’s designed to serve as an alternative to pain medications like opiates. The company has been using generative artificial intelligence to scale its care team in recent years.
The company competes directly with other digital health startups like Sword Health, but Hinge Health is about four times larger than is closet competitor, the person said.
Investors will be watching closely to see whether Hinge Health’s IPO serves as a positive bellwether for the sector.
Bloomberg reported Hinge Health’s IPO plans earlier on Friday.
WATCH: The market is in a good environment for hedge funds, says Citi’s Mithra Warrier
Elon Musk speaks during the first cabinet meeting hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump, at the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., February 26, 2025.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
Tesla’s stock has never had a stretch this red.
For seven straight weeks, since Elon Musk went to Washington, D.C. to join the Trump administration, shares in his automaker have declined, closing on Friday at $270.48. It’s the longest such losing streak for Tesla in its 15 years as a public company.
Tesla shares finished the week down more than 10% and at their lowest level since Nov. 5, Election Day, when they closed at $251.44. Since the stock peaked at almost $480 on Dec. 17, Tesla has lost well over $800 billion in market cap.
Several Wall Street firms this week, including Bank of America, Baird and Goldman Sachs, cut their price targets on Tesla.
In slashing their target from $490 to $380, analysts at Bank of America cited concerns about the company’s falling new vehicle sales and the lack of a recent update from Musk on a “low-cost model.”
Goldman Sachs, which cut its price target on the stock to $320 from $345, also pointed to falling electric vehicle sales for Tesla in the first two months of the year across several markets in Europe, China and parts of the U.S.
The Goldman analysts noted that Tesla faces, “a tough competitive environment for FSD” in China, where key competitors “do not generally require a separate software purchase for smart driving features.” FSD, or Full Self-Driving (Supervised), is Tesla’s partially automated driving system, which the company sells as a premium option in the U.S.
Baird added Tesla to its “bearish fresh picks” this week, with analysts at the firm writing, “production downtime” will complicate “the supply-side of the equation” for Tesla as the company shifts to manufacturing the new version of its Model Y SUV.
Elon Musk stands as he is recognized by U.S. President Donald Trump during Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 4, 2025.
Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images
But Wall Street isn’t just concerned about fundamental metrics like sales and production figures. Investors are also trying to assess how much Musk’s politics and work in the White House will pressure Tesla, and for how long.
“Musk’s involvement with the Trump administration adds uncertainty to the demand-side,” Baird analysts wrote.
Before taking on his role as advisor to President Donald Trump, and the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk was already heading up his many private ventures, including artificial intelligence startup xAI, social media company X and aerospace and defense contractor SpaceX.
Concerned bulls
Now Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has become the public face of the Trump administration’s effort to dramatically reduce the federal government’s workforce, spending and capacity. Meanwhile, he continues to post incendiary political rhetoric on X, slamming judges whose decisions he doesn’t like, and promoting false Kremlin talking points about Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Anti-Musk and anti-Tesla sentiment have been rising in the U.S. and Europe, with an outburst of protests and suspected criminal acts of arson and vandalism at Tesla facilities.
Even the most bullish analysts, and many fans, have had to acknowledge the impact of Musk’s politics on the desirability of Tesla and its products to a wide swath of customers and investors.
EV advocates at Cleantechnica, which has long promoted Tesla on its site, ran an ethics-focused column on Thursday asking if Tesla owners should sell their cars, and contemplating whether the Tesla board should fire Musk as CEO.
Musk and Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a note out Friday, Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives wrote, “Tesla bulls find themselves with their back against the wall facing global negative sentiment around Musk/DOGE and the Trump Administration.” He called it a “gut check moment for the Tesla bulls (including ourselves).”
Wedbush said it’s using the selloff as an opportunity to add Tesla to its “Best Ideas” list, and set its 12-month price target at $550.
“The best thing that ever happened to Musk and Tesla was Trump in the White House as this will create a deregulatory environment with a federal autonomous roadmap central to the Tesla golden strategic vision,” the firm wrote.
The Tesla bulls see the potential for the company to soon launch affordable new model EVs, a robotaxi and driverless ridehail service, and to deliver humanoid robots capable of factory work in the not-too-distant future. Ives said he expects Musk will become more focused on Tesla and his other companies in the second half of 2025.
Analysts at TD Cowen are also optimistic. In a note on Thursday, they wrote, “Tesla now appears to be in the early innings of a major 2025-26 product cycle, one that we believe could re-invigorate volume growth and boost overall share price sentiment.”
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