Indian American researcher Ayush Chopra’s project simulating the emerging human–AI labor market, revealing risks to the workforce and ripple effects across the broader economy, has won a $250,000 grant from GitLab Foundation’s AI for Economic Opportunity Fund.
Selected from over 800 applicants, Project Iceberg from the Camera Culture group is one of the 16 new recipients of the grant given to organizations using AI to expand economic opportunity in innovative ways.
Led by graduate student Chopra, Project Iceberg is a research effort based at the MIT Media Lab for modeling and simulating population-scale systems. Beyond labor markets, the platform has been used globally to study systemic risks across pandemics, supply chains, consumer behavior, and infrastructure, helping institutions anticipate disruption and test interventions at scale before consequences materialize.
Project Iceberg develops Large Population Models, AI systems designed to simulate how large populations behave and interact. Using this approach, Iceberg models the US workforce as a digital population of 151 million agents, capturing the tasks, skills, and occupations of real workers. The platform simulates the emerging human–AI labor market, revealing risks to the workforce and ripple effects across the broader economy.
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The flagship output is the Iceberg Index, an early warning signal of AI-driven labor market risk. Released last year, the Index is now being used by multiple U.S. states to monitor workforce disruption and anticipate how AI-driven changes may propagate through local economies.
The GitLab Foundation grant supports the national scaling of this platform to address one of the most consequential challenges of our time: understanding how AI will reshape the future of work.
Funding will expand the Index to ZIP-code granularity across all 50 states, enable regular updates to workforce exposure metrics, and support new simulation tools that allow governments and institutions to test workforce interventions before committing resources to implementation.
GitLab Foundation is partnering with OpenAI, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Ballmer Group on the fund with OpenAI again providing expanded support. As part of the grant, the research team will receive $250,000 in funding, six months of technical collaboration with OpenAI engineers, API credits, and access to a network of practitioners and funders working at the intersection of AI and economic mobility.
Chopra’s research making fundamental advances in multi-agent simulations has been deployed across several countries. He has published papers in leading academic venues, received multiple best paper awards and contributed to 25 patents. Prior to MIT, Choprawas an engineer at Adobe where he received the Outstanding Young Engineer Award for my work on collaborative systems.