OpenAI’s Altman believes AI is unlikely to cause a “jobs apocalypse.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday the rapid development ‌and adoption of AI would not lead to a global “jobs apocalypse” and the technology had not claimed as many white-collar jobs as he had feared.

Speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney, Altman said he was initially concerned about the impact AI would have on global employment ​levels.

He said he and his executives had been “roughly right” on the technological predictions made by OpenAI when it launched ​ChatGPT in 2022. But he said they were “pretty wrong” on the social and economic implications.

“I’m glad to be wrong about this. I expected a greater impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than what we’ve actually seen,” Altman said in an interview with CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn. “I think I understand better now why that hasn’t happened, and I’m grateful, but it’s an area where my instincts were clearly 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 we should probably ​talk about it’ and it still may.”
Altman did not cite any jobs numbers on Tuesday but has previously talked about potential ​industry-wide job cuts due to AI’s advancement.

A growing number of global companies, including HSBC (HSBA.L), Amazon (AMZN.O), Standard Chartered (STAN.L), and CBA (CBA.AX), have announced that some jobs within their organizations are being replaced by AI.
OpenAI is reportedly getting ready to confidentially file for a U.S. initial public offering in the next few weeks, according to Reuters and a source familiar with the situation. Back in October, Reuters said the company might be targeting a $1 trillion valuation and looking to raise at least $60 billion.

Altman said he had realised that even though AI was taking on an increasingly active role ​in many industries and jobs, there ​was still a ‘human part’ ⁠of employment that could not be replaced.

He said he had been using AI to respond to Slack and email messages but had reverted to answering some 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,” he ⁠said.

“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.”

That realisation, he said, had made him believe the human interaction required in ⁠many jobs ​would not be replaced by AI.

“It really, in both positive and negative ways, ​updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought,” he said.

“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.”