GDPval: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable Tasks
This addresses the need for assessing AI capabilities in practical economic contexts, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarking efforts.
The paper introduces GDPval, a benchmark for evaluating AI models on real-world economically valuable tasks based on U.S. labor statistics, finding that frontier models are approaching expert quality and improving linearly over time.
We introduce GDPval, a benchmark evaluating AI model capabilities on real-world economically valuable tasks. GDPval covers the majority of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Work Activities for 44 occupations across the top 9 sectors contributing to U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Tasks are constructed from the representative work of industry professionals with an average of 14 years of experience. We find that frontier model performance on GDPval is improving roughly linearly over time, and that the current best frontier models are approaching industry experts in deliverable quality. We analyze the potential for frontier models, when paired with human oversight, to perform GDPval tasks cheaper and faster than unaided experts. We also demonstrate that increased reasoning effort, increased task context, and increased scaffolding improves model performance on GDPval. Finally, we open-source a gold subset of 220 tasks and provide a public automated grading service at evals.openai.com to facilitate future research in understanding real-world model capabilities.