OpenAI’s Sam Altman: AI will not trigger a global ‘jobs apocalypse’

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has said surging AI adoption would not lead to a global “jobs apocalypse” and the technology hadn’t claimed as many white-collar jobs as he had feared.

The CEO added that he was initially concerned about the impact AI would have on global employment levels. Even though AI was taking on a more active role across many industries and jobs, Altman stressed there is still a “human part” of employment that couldn’t be replaced.

“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 happened,” he told Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn in an interview, as reported by Reuters.

He added: “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. 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.”

Speaking at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney, Altman said he was previously concerned about the impact of AI on global employment. He explained he and his team were “roughly right” with their predictions in 2022, when OpenAI first launched ChatGPT, but were “pretty wrong” when it came to social and economic implications.

His comments come after a string of job cuts across the technology sector in particular, including the likes of Oracle, Amazon, Telstra, Meta and Salesforce, among others, as companies pivot more towards AI investment. Some companies even announced the jobs would be directly replaced by AI.

When speaking about AI outsourcing, Altman said OpenAI doesn’t plan to implement it anytime soon. He suggested that he believes more widely that the human interaction required in plenty of jobs wouldn’t be replaced by AI.

“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, as reported by Reuters. “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.”

OpenAI is also preparing to file for a US initial public offering as soon as this year.

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