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- OpenAI Just Revealed Which Workplace Skills Will Matter Most in the AI Era 👀
OpenAI Just Revealed Which Workplace Skills Will Matter Most in the AI Era 👀
How People Around the World Feel About AI 🌎
Gina Acosta
September 27, 2026
In partnership with
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
In today's issue, we cover data showing how AI optimism is outpacing AI worry globally, a new OpenAI report on which workplace skills may matter most in the AI era, and a debate among AI experts over the risks of AI.
Let’s jump right in!
Read Time: 4.5’ min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Chart of the week: How People Around the World Feel About AI
OpenAI Highlights the Workplace Skills AI Still Struggles to Replace
AI Findings/Resources
AI tools to check out
Video of the week
TOGETHER WITH CUEY
Stop betting on one AI answer.
According to Artificial Analysis' AA-Omniscience benchmark, the best AI model is right only 67% of the time. And it sounds confident even when it's wrong.
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Cuey lives inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and more.
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See where the models disagree before a hallucination costs you.
Chart of the week
How People Around the World Feel About AI
In 25 of the 37 countries surveyed, majorities of AI-aware adults expect AI to improve their daily lives.
Views of AI's impact on the country are somewhat less positive: optimists outnumber pessimists in 29 countries, but only constitute an absolute majority in 18.
Notably, 93% in China said AI will mostly help their country, compared with just 36% in the U.S.
The U.S. and other wealthy Western countries stand out for higher levels of AI worry, with frequent users of the technology generally more trusting and less worried than those with less or no experience with it.
AI News
OPENAI
OpenAI Highlights the Workplace Skills AI Still Struggles to Replace
OpenAI recently published a report on how its researchers use AI. The data shows which workplace tasks are being absorbed by AI and which still rely on people, hinting at which skills may become most valuable in the AI era.
Details:
The biggest gains in AI assisted work this year have come in coding, technical support, monitoring computer runs and analyzing results.
AI is doing far less work when it comes to deciding which projects to pursue, where resources should go and what priorities teams should set.
OpenAI says its researchers still determine which ideas and results are worth pursuing and whether systems should be scaled, paused or deployed.
These decisions often require context, tradeoffs and judgment, making them harder to automate than more clearly defined execution tasks.
The research suggests that as AI takes on more of the execution involved in knowledge work, human responsibilities could increasingly center on making the right decisions.
AI Findings/Resources
🤯 This man's flight got delayed 7 hours, so he asked Muse to file for compensation, and 5 minutes later he had a $250 credit and a rebooked flight
AI Tools to check out
🖱️ AIclicks: Tracks your AI visibility, identifies the sources driving citations, and helps get your brand mentioned by AI.
🥗 PlanEat: AI turns your health goals into a 7-day menu & grocery list.
👀 Cekura: Monitor and test voice & chat AI agents.
💧 SynthID: A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI.
🗣️ Theysaid: AI user testing, surveys & interviews platform.
Video of the week
AI Experts Debate: Four AI Experts Debate: Existential Threat or Overblown Fear?
Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, and Roman Yampolskiy debate the existential risks of AI, centering on whether AI development should be halted to prevent a potentially catastrophic superintelligence.
The Argument That AI Is an Existential Threat
Proponents of this view argue that creating artificial superintelligence presents a catastrophic risk to human survival that cannot be ignored or easily mitigated.
Roman Yampolskiy argues that general superintelligence is inherently impossible to control, predict, or explain. Once a system surpasses human intelligence, human agency is effectively lost, leading to guaranteed extinction if we keep racing ahead.
Nate Soares highlights that AI models are already displaying misaligned behavior.
Safety advocates argue that even a small probability of human extinction (e.g., 8–10% acknowledged privately or publicly by industry figures like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Geoffrey Hinton) is an unacceptable gamble for humanity to take.
Driven by corporate greed, fear of competitors (or adversaries like China), and executive ego, frontier AI labs are racing forward at a dangerous speed without establishing proper containment or regulatory safeguards.
The Argument That AI Threat Is Overblown
Opponents argue that the existential risk narrative is a speculative distraction that ignores the massive benefits of the technology and overstates software capabilities.
Ed Zitron and Andrew McAfee contend that focusing on speculative "sci-fi" extinction scenarios distracts from present-day issues such as climate impact from data centers, mass misinformation, mental health harms, and economic disruption.
Skeptics argue that large language models (LLMs) are not superintelligence and do not possess human-like consciousness or intent. Threshold arguments about sudden "recursive self-improvement" rely on long chains of unproven assumptions.
Andrew McAfee asserts that humanity has a high capacity to manage and contain technological risks as they arise. Furthermore, halting AI development would forfeit monumental, real-world breakthroughs in fields like medicine, disease eradication, and scientific research.
Critics emphasize that incidents like the Hugging Face breach stem from poorly configured security sandboxes and reckless corporate execution by human executives, rather than an autonomous "sentient" software uprising.
The Fundamental Divide
The Race for Safety vs. Progress: One side demands an immediate, coordinated pause on frontier general AI research, comparing the current trajectory to driving a bus toward a cliff. The other side maintains that stopping research is economically and morally indefensible, arguing we should leverage AI tools to solve real-world human problems.
When asked to write down their probability of human extinction from AI, the panel was sharply divided: Nate Soares argued the probability is much higher than 10%, Roman Yampolskiy put it at 99.9% if superintelligence is ever created, since he believes we won't be able to control it, while Ed Zitron and Andrew McAfee considered the risk effectively zero.
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻