Sam Altman says he was initially wrong about AI — and he's 'delighted' it hasn't unleashed a 'job apocalypse' after all. Why his stance has shifted

“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.

“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 [and] we should probably ​talk about it’ and it still may.”

Why the change?

Altman’s about-face came, he said, as he realized that despite AI’s spread in many parts of the workforce, there was still a “human part” of working that the technology couldn’t replace. For example, Altman had an AI chatbot handling replies to emails and Slack messages for a while, but has since begun answering more of those himself, as he found it mattered to him and others that correspondence in certain settings was authentic.

“We really do care about our interactions with people and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon,” he said.

It’s also worth noting that OpenAI is expected to confidentially file for an IPO in the coming weeks, with plans to raise $60 billion or more. So painting the company’s product in a less intimidating light could assist with that.

Some agree. Some don’t.

Altman isn’t the only AI CEO who’s backtracking on warnings about the technology’s impact on the job market. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do. (Anthropic, also, is preparing for an IPO.)

Despite the high-profile changes of opinion, AI is still being blamed regularly as companies cut big portions of their workforce. Meta, which laid off 8,000 employees last week, cited the technology as the reason. (Another 7,000 workers were reassigned to AI initiatives.) Pinterest, Dow and Amazon have also indicated AI was behind recent layoffs.

Meanwhile, a new study from consulting firm Mercer found virtually every employer is planning to cut jobs due to the technology. Some 99% of the 825 C-level executives surveyed said they expect AI to lead to at least some headcount reduction in the next two years. And just 32% of the CEOs surveyed said they believed the workforce can combine both human and machine-worker capabilities in an optimal manner.