Sam Altman Says AI Is Unlikely to Cause a ‘Jobs Apocalypse’

NEW DELHI — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday that artificial intelligence is unlikely to cause the kind of global “jobs apocalypse” many had feared, acknowledging that his earlier concerns about major white-collar job losses may have been overstated.

Speaking at a conference hosted by Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, Altman said he initially expected AI to eliminate far more entry-level white-collar jobs after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. So far, he said, the effect on employment has been less severe than he had anticipated.

“I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” Altman said during a conversation with CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn.

“I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” he said.

Altman said OpenAI had been “roughly right” about the pace of AI’s technological progress, but “pretty wrong” about its social and economic effects. He said early warnings about job losses came from what appeared to be a real risk at the time.

“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,” Altman said.

His comments come as several major companies, including HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, have said some roles are being replaced or reshaped by AI tools and automation.

Altman said he has increasingly recognized that human interaction remains central to many jobs and cannot easily be replicated by machines.

He described experimenting with AI-generated replies for Slack and email messages before eventually returning to writing responses himself.

“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,” he said. (Source: IANS)