OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI has not replaced as many entry-level white-collar jobs as he had earlier feared. Speaking at a conference hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, Altman admitted that some of his earlier concerns about AI’s impact on jobs were wrong. He said that while he and his executives were “roughly right” about the technological predictions OpenAI made when it launched ChatGPT in 2022, they were “pretty wrong” about its social and economic impact.
“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, reports 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.”
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Altman also reflected on the warnings he previously gave about AI-related job losses. According to him, the concerns were genuine at the time. He said, “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.”
Even though AI tools are becoming more common in workplaces, Altman believes human interaction still plays a major role in many jobs. He shared a personal example, saying he once used AI to reply to Slack and email messages on his behalf but later started responding himself again.
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“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,” he said.
Altman added that this experience changed the way he looks at AI and employment. He now feels many jobs will continue to require a human touch that AI cannot fully replace.
“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,” he said.
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