The trick: Self-Marked
OpenAI's chief economist studied whether companies love ChatGPT.
The data was ChatGPT's.
a working paper from OpenAI's chief economist and coauthors at Columbia and Wharton documents enterprise AI adoption using ChatGPT Enterprise records: usage growing fast, adoption concentrated among larger, more valuable, R&D-intensive firms, and early-career workers using it hardest, across 1,500+ organizations and 17 million messages.
Before you read on. Your call?
TRUE, BUT
17m
the paper itself is the careful member of the family. It says its estimates describe conditional associations and should not be interpreted causally, covers only OpenAI's own product, and admits its job-title data is incomplete. The structural problem survives the hedging: the evidence is OpenAI's logs, analyzed by OpenAI, with no external access for auditing, and the sample is by construction OpenAI's paying customers. Meanwhile the companion marketing already converts the caution into momentum: token shares 'suggesting substantive, delegated work' and thirty-minutes-versus-two-weeks anecdotes.
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The trick has a name
We call it Self-Marked: graded by the party that benefits from the grade. You'll see it again. Learn to spot it →
Receipts
- Supports arxiv.org:
ChatGPT Enterprise usage has grown rapidly due to a combination of new firm adoption and growing intensity among existing adopters
- Context arxiv.org:
over 1,500 organizations and over 17 million messages
- Refutes arxiv.org:
our estimates describe conditional associations between these pre-adoption firm characteristics and the probability that a public firm is observed as a ChatGPT Enterprise adopter, and should not be interpreted causally
- Refutes news.ycombinator.com:
This reads like some crypto or NFT commodity white paper
- Context news.ycombinator.com:
This is a typical working paper (preprint) not white paper, for its field.
- Context web.archive.org:
Codex generated 64% of combined Codex and ChatGPT output tokens among enterprise customers, suggesting that agents are enabling a shift toward more substantive, delegated work
- Context digitaltoday.co.kr:
OpenAI enterprise customers generated 64 percent of their AI usage from Codex.
Open the Receipts Pack → What each source proves, every figure traced, and what would change our verdict.