Workers, Get Ready for the Great Rebalancing

American workers’ wild ride is coming to an end.

After three whiplash-inducing years of, first, professional vulnerability and, then, perceived invincibility, many people are returning to more typical levels of career security and leverage.

Call it the Great Rebalancing of the employer-employee relationship.

“We’re clearly headed there,” says Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute.

Not long ago, at the pandemic’s onset, things were so bad that people lost jobs in record numbers as the U.S. unemployment rate reached 14.7%. Then things got so good that workers resigned in record numbers. There was a catchy name for this trend, I believe.

Adding to the volatility, savings swelled and shrivelled with the stock market, causing some people to lurch between hope for an early retirement and fear of working forever. Raises that made some feel flush were offset by inflation, in many cases.

The “quiet quitters” who reduced their on-the-job efforts while feeling untouchable last year may now be angling to fill key roles when their companies freeze or cut head counts.

Ms. Shierholz says that workers are still in good shape, overall, but certain key metrics are trending down toward normal ranges. December’s hourly earnings increase of 4.6% from a year earlier was the smallest rise since mid-2021, and the 223,000 additional jobs were the fewest per month in two years.

To complain about such decreases would be akin to griping if Yankees slugger Aaron Judge were to hit only 50 home runs this year, after smacking an American League-record 62 last season. It’s unrealistic to expect new peaks all the time, and it’s worth remembering what 2020 was like. (Mr. Judge, beset by injuries, hit 9 homers that year, by the way.)

Francesco Carucci, a California software developer, says he knew that his pay package was “wildly inflated” when he joined Meta Platforms Inc. last January. He says Facebook’s parent company tripled the total compensation that he earned at his previous employer, amid a hiring spree in a historically tight labor market.

Then Meta laid off Mr. Carucci late last year in a round of 11,000 job cuts. Being aware of his bloated comp didn’t dull the sting of losing it, he says, and he got an additional reality check this month when he accepted an offer that is worth half of the one he received a year ago.

Still, he says his new pay is reasonable—more than what he made a few years ago—and the interview and negotiation process was more in line with what he has usually experienced over a 25-year career. He adds that he’s trying not to take the layoff personally. He views it instead as part of a natural and inevitable correction to the job market.

Others would do well to practice the same attitude. Andy Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which helps companies manage layoffs and provides career coaching to the dismissed, tells me that business is picking back up after two of the slowest years in the firm’s history. He offers a blunt translation of what that means: “We know that there are a lot more layoffs coming.”

Ominous as that sounds, Mr. Challenger says the prospects of finding new work are generally good. Job openings, while shrinking, still outnumber the unemployed by several million, according to federal data. He expects that gap to narrow as the year goes on and advises job seekers to redouble their urgency.

“It’s not a time to lay back and feel too comfortable about the tight labor market,” he says. “Even if you’re getting lots of messages from recruiters today, that can dry up pretty quickly as things turn.”

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.

Workers, Get Ready for the Great Rebalancing

This may be the year when employer-employee power dynamics begin to normalize