OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has announced a new benchmark for testing its GPT-5 model, which involves pitting the AI directly against human experts in a variety of occupations.
The benchmark is called GDPval and is responsible for assessing how close ChatGPT is getting to outperforming humans at “economically valuable, real-world tasks”. That means moving beyond things like academic tests and coding competitions towards jobs that are carried out in the real world: nursing, financial management, engineering or journalism.
This is all part of OpenAI’s effort to establish artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the company notes that its GPT-5 model (and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1) “are already approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts.”
In a blog post explaining the new testing, OpenAI explained: “Unlike traditional benchmarks, GDPval tasks are not simple text prompts.
“They come with reference files and context, and the expected deliverables span documents, slides, diagrams, spreadsheets, and multimedia. This realism makes GDPval a more realistic test of how models might support professionals.”
“The GDPval full set includes 1,320 specialized tasks (220 in the gold open-sourced set), each meticulously crafted and vetted by experienced professionals with over 14 years of experience on average from these fields. Every task is based on real work products, such as a legal brief, an engineering blueprint, a customer support conversation, or a nursing care plan.”
What jobs is OpenAI testing ChatGPT against?
The tasks covered 44 different jobs across nine different industries. Here’s the full list:
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Real Estate, rental and leasing
Concierges
Property, real estate, and community association managers
Real estate sales agents
Real estate brokers
Counter and rental clerks
Government
Recreation workers
Compliance officers
First-line supervisors of police and detectives
Administrative services managers
Child, family, and school social workers
Manufacturing
Mechanical engineers
Industrial engineers
Buyers and purchasing agents
Shipping, receiving, and inventory clerks
First-line supervisors of production and operating workers
Professional, scientific, and technical services
Software developers
Lawyers
Accountants and auditors
Computer and information systems managers
Project management specialists
Health and social care
Registered nurses
Nurse practitioners
Medical and health services managers
First-line supervisors of office and administrative support workers
Medical secretaries and administrative assistants
Finance and insurance
Customer service representatives
Financial and investment analysts
Financial managers
Personal financial advisors
Securities, commodities and financial services sales agents
Retail
Pharmacists
First-line supervisors of retail sales workers
General and operations managers
Private detectives and investigators
Wholesale trade
Sales managers
Order clerks
First-line supervisors of non-retail sales workers
Sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, except technical and scientific products
Sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products
Media
Audio and video technicians
Producers and directors
News analysts, reporters, and journalists
Film and video editors
Editors
So, will AI take my job?
It’s the $64,000 question and the answer, probably, is yes. Or at least AI will take some measure of your job. OpenAI itself notes GDPval is an “early step that doesn’t reflect the full nuance of many economic tasks.”
Additionally, while the test “spans 44 occupations and hundreds of knowledge work tasks, it is limited to one-shot evaluations, so it doesn’t capture cases where a model would need to build context or improve through multiple drafts.”
There’s still a long way to go, and a recent study claimed ChatGPT still routinely gets things wrong. But OpenAI is working hard on hitting AGI and says that future versions will extend to more interactive workflows and context-rich tasks to “better reflect the complexity of real-world knowledge work”.
The fact that AI will reshape our working landscape is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point. But the way in which it’s integrated into most societies is still very much in the hands of humans, business leaders and customers. There will always be work for humans to do, that’s also a foregone conclusion, but the type of work is almost certain to look a lot different in the decades to come.
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