Altman Questions AI-Induced Job Apocalypse

OpenAI CEO doubts AI will cause a global job apocalypse.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has expressed skepticism that the advancement of artificial intelligence will lead to a global “job apocalypse.” This was reported by Reuters.

According to him, AI has not yet caused the large-scale reduction in office jobs that he himself anticipated following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

“I’m glad I was wrong. It seemed that by now the impact on entry-level office positions would be greater,” the entrepreneur said at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney.

The CEO stated that the company “roughly accurately” assessed the technological development of LLM, but erred in predicting its immediate social and economic consequences.

Altman noted that he previously considered the risk of mass automation to be real and therefore spoke about it publicly. He mentioned that such a threat might still exist, but the situation now appears different.

He explained this by noting that many professions retain a “human element” that is difficult to replace with algorithms. As an example, Altman shared that he tried using AI for responses in Slack and email but then returned to personal communication.

“We truly value interaction with people,” he stated.

In Altman’s view, this experience has altered his perception of the future labor market. He believes that the employment landscape will be “quite different” from what many industry participants expected.

However, layoffs due to artificial intelligence are still occurring. In April, Oracle began cutting thousands of employees amid falling stock prices and significant capital expenditures on AI infrastructure development.

In February, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced the layoff of nearly 4,000 employees. The decision was linked to the company’s transition to a “more compact, flat, and AI-focused” structure.

Earlier in May, China banned layoffs due to AI.