MIT created duplicate AI workers to tackle thousands of different tasks. The verdict? Most of the time AI is still just ‘minimally sufficient’

The growing share of American office workers who have experimented with artificial intelligence in their day-to-day work have likely had a few moments of doubt as to their long-term job stability. 

But for all the improvements in AI over the past few years, the technology is still only able to hit low bars in specific workplace tasks, according to recent data published by MIT. Even then, it might still be making some big mistakes.

Workers concerned they might soon be replaced by AI will likely be reassured by new research coming out of MIT, which frames the AI-driven jobs takeover narrative not so much as a fast-paced action movie, but more like a slow-burn think piece.

AI is gradually improving at accomplishing a variety of tasks across a number of professions, according to a study of preliminary findings released on Thursday. But in most cases, the performance of currently available models is similar to that of a disenchanted intern—hitting minimum benchmarks but struggling overall to produce quality work without a human hand to refine its output.

Clearing the bar

MIT researchers used 41 different LLMs—including versions of Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT—to analyze performance in more than 11,000 primarily text-based tas...