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The OpenAI chief says his early concerns over job losses were based on the speed at which AI systems were improving.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
As companies across the world continue to cut jobs and adopt artificial intelligence (AI) at a rapid pace, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pushed back against fears that AI will trigger a massive global employment crisis, saying the technology has not disrupted white-collar jobs as quickly as he had once expected.
Speaking virtually at a conference hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney on Tuesday, Altman admitted that OpenAI had correctly anticipated the pace of AI development after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, but had misread how society and workplaces would react to it.
“I’m delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” Altman said while interacting with CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn.
The OpenAI chief said his early concerns over job losses were based on the speed at which AI systems were improving.
“I now think I understand more about why it hasn’t, and I’m obviously grateful but that is an area where my intuitions were just off,” he said.
Altman also responded to criticism that AI leaders may have amplified fears around mass unemployment.
“People are like ‘oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at the time I was like ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it’ and it still may,” he said.
According to Altman, one reason AI has not replaced workers as rapidly as expected is because human interaction continues to remain central to many jobs.
Sharing a personal example, he said he had briefly experimented with allowing AI to respond to his Slack and email messages, but later realised people still value direct human communication.
“I had it reply to messages, saying ‘this is Sam’s AI’ and it was an amazing example to me of we really do care about people,” Altman said. “We really do care about our interactions with people and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon.”
The experience changed his outlook on how AI may shape future employment trends.
“It really, in both positive and negative ways, updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about.”
Altman’s comments come amid rising concerns over AI-led restructuring across the corporate world. Meta recently laid off nearly 8,000 employees as it sharpens its AI strategy, while companies including Amazon, HSBC and Standard Chartered have acknowledged that AI is beginning to replace or reduce certain roles.
Last week, Bill Winters defended plans to reduce around 7,800 back-office positions, saying the move was aimed at replacing “lower-value human capital” with investments in technology and AI infrastructure.
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