Speaking at a conference Tuesday (May 26), Sam Altman acknowledged that a “jobs apocalypse” triggered by artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has not come to pass.
“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,” said Altman, whose comments at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney were reported by Reuters.
“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,” Altman 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.”
Altman said he and his fellow executives had been “roughly right” on the predictions they made when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in 2022, but were “pretty wrong” on the technology’s social and economic impact.
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The executive’s comments came a little more than a week after Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman similarly rejected the idea of an AI-related job apocalypse.
“Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, but I don’t think that’s true,” Garman said when asked by The Wall Street Journal about predictions that artificial intelligence would cause unemployment on the level seen during the Great Depression.
“I think it’s the potential to create massive value, and I think there’s going to be new and different types of jobs,” Garman said.
As Reuters notes, a growing number of companies — such as HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered and CBA — have announced that some of their jobs would be replaced with AI.
But although these cuts tend to trigger fears about a broader employment crisis, current labor research presents a more complex picture, PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.
At the time, the World Economic Forum had just argued that while automation and AI will displace some tasks, they will also bring about new categories of work, especially in data, AI oversight, cybersecurity and human-centric services.
“The pressure is real, but it is directional. Roles centered on routine information processing are most exposed,” PYMNTS wrote. “Roles combining domain expertise, judgment and technological fluency are expanding.”