It's conceivable to us working in white collar knowledge jobs where our input and output is language. Will it also make 5% more homes built by a carpenter?

That seems pretty reasonable, yes. That is like asking if putting a low-cost Ops Research specialist in every company could make a 5% difference in operations - yes it could. Making resource-efficient decisions is not something that comes naturally to humans and having a system that consistently makes high quality game-theoretic recommendations would be huge.

Bunch of tiny companies would love to hire a mathematician to optimise what they are doing to get a 5-10% improvement. Unfortunately a 5-10% improvement in a small business can't justify the cost of hiring another person, and good mathematicians with business sense and empathy are a rare commodity.

It might provide cover to lay off more than 5% of us (the LLM can create a work-like text product that, as far as upper management can tell, is indistinguishable from the real thing!), then we will have to go find jobs swinging hammers to build houses. Well, somebody’s got to do it.