- Sam Altman says he doesn’t think AI will lead to a ‘job apocalypse’
- OpenAI CEO says human interaction will always be necessary
- Altman says he uses AI to respond to Slack and emails
Sam Altman has criticized claims that the growing global use of AI technology around the world will lead to a “jobs apocalypse”, despite widespread reports this is exactly what is happening in many industries.
The OpenAI CEO also admitted that while he believed his company had been “pretty much right” in the technology predictions it made when it launched ChatGPT in 2022, they were “pretty wrong” in the social and economic implications.
Altman also noted that while he was initially concerned about the impact AI would have on global employment levels, he believed things were not as bad as many had imagined.
“I’m happy to be wrong”
“I’m delighted to be wrong on this, I thought there would have been a bigger impact on the elimination of entry-level management jobs by now than what actually happened,” Altman told CBA chief executive Matt Comyn in a virtual interview at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney (via PakGazette).
“Now I think I understand better why that wasn’t the case, and I’m obviously grateful, but that’s one area where my intuitions were wrong,” he added.
“People say, ‘Oh, you could have saved the world a lot of fear and a lot of doom and gloom,’ but at the time I thought, ‘I see this is a real risk, we should probably talk about it,’ and it’s still possible.”
Altman’s comments come days after Meta laid off about 8,000 workers following multiple failed AI-related projects, and many others were forcibly reassigned to new AI jobs.
Banking giant Standard Chartered was also widely criticized recently after its chief executive described workers as “lower value human capital” shortly after cutting thousands of jobs in favor of artificial intelligence tools.
Altman also revealed a bit about using AI tools for his personal work life, including using Slack and email messages.
However, he noted that he had returned to answer some questions himself, as there is still a “human part” of employment that must be present.
“I had him respond to messages saying ‘this is Sam’s AI’ and it was an amazing example to me that we really care about people,” he said.
“We really care about our interactions with people and this, which takes up a lot of my time, is not something I can imagine outsourcing to an AI anytime soon.”
Overall, Altman said these feelings made him realize that human workers will continue to have a place in most functions in the future.
“It really, both positively and negatively, updated me to think that the job landscape is probably going to be very different than we thought,” he said.
“I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of job apocalypse that some of the companies in our space are advocating or talking about.”
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