Economic Evaluations of Language Models

Alexander Wan, Stephane Hatgis-Kessell, Tomás Aguirre, Percy Liang, Rishi Bommasani

Language models perform economically valuable work, yet they are not currently assessed for how well they perform every economically valuable task. We introduce EconEvals as an open-source evaluation suite to measure capabilities relevant to tasks, work activities, and occupations in the US labor economy. We ground the evaluation suite in real user queries to language models where possible, and supplement these with synthetic data. Our evaluations improve coverage over OpenAI's GDPval benchmark, which is the existing state-of-the-art that covers 5% of US occupations, at 500x lower cost. Alongside benchmarks, we also introduce a simulation-based exposure measure to estimate how much time current language model capabilities could save across all tasks belonging to all US occupations, with detailed accounting for each estimate. Our estimates indicate that current models could save workers substantial time on at least half of their tasks in 47% of occupations. However, for 79% of tasks where we predict substantial time savings, observed Claude usage is low, suggesting that existing usage lags potential. Beyond inherent constraints of language model chatbots, our data identifies privacy and proprietary systems as the principal bottlenecks limiting further time savings from AI. Overall, we introduce adaptable infrastructure that grounds inferences about language models' labor-market impact in their current capabilities, which can be continually updated as capabilities improve.