Sam Altman is “delighted to be wrong” about AI destroying jobs

Unlike some of his industry peers, Open AI CEO Sam Altman has been surprisingly skeptical of the notion that AI is displacing workers. In an interview a few months ago, he argued that AI was a convenient scapegoat for some companies, echoing what some economists and experts have expressed about the narrative that AI is driving layoffs across corporate America. “I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do. And then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Altman said at the time. In an interview this week, however, Altman made a bolder statement, suggesting there was little evidence AI would do extensive damage to white-collar jobs, despite predictions to the contrary. “I’m delighted to ⁠be wrong about this,” he said on Tuesday during a virtual appearance at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference, according to a Reuters report. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened.” “My intuitions were just off,” he added. “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.’” Part of the reason for this realization, Altman claims, is that he underestimated the human element that so many jobs require. He had tried using AI to field emails and Slack chats, but increasingly found himself responding to those messages himself—which apparently led him to believe the impact on jobs will be different than he had originally anticipated. “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. While companies have repeatedly cited AI and automation when conducting layoffs, the labor market does not ye