OpenAI CEO Sam Altman makes a lot of predictions. Here’s how they’ve fared so far

Reports of an AI-led “jobs apocalypse” are greatly exaggerated. Or at least that’s what Sam Altman now claims. During the Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference last week, the Open AI CEO admitted he may have been wrong about some predictions—namely the speed with which articial intelligence would feed a substantial chunk of office jobs into the digital wood chipper. “I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” Altman said. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.” Anyone worried about their future employability, however, might not want to stop refining their résumé just yet. Altman tends to make a lot of wild tech predictions, several of which he’s already had to walk back. It’s still entirely possible that layoffs will ramp up soon, forcing him to walk back the walk-back. The problem is that, unlike some of his more bombastic peers, some of Altman’s loftier predictions have ended up proving accurate. Just how seriously should observers take the next forecast, as OpenAI prepares to follow its chief competitor Anthropic in filing an initial public offering? Perhaps the best way to decide is by taking a close look at his track record so far. Predictions that proved accurate If Altman has a penchant for grandiosity, he’s at least somewhat entitled. Historically, few people have lived to see the grandness of their vision so thoroughly realized. “In the next five years,” he wrote in a 2021 blog post to a pandemic-addled public, “computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice.” Whether what AI chatbots do can accurately be described as “thinking” remains the subject of debate, but Altman was 100% right about the mass adoption of AI that would follow the release of ChatGPT in 2022. In the years since, it’s become a general-purpose digital tool for millions of users—a Google that can also write a book report, or lines of code, on a user’s behalf. (Somet