Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has admitted that his earlier predictions about AI wiping out entry-level white-collar jobs were off the mark. Speaking at a tech conference, Altman said he's "delighted to be wrong" about the technology's short-term impact on employment.
"My scorecard, at the highest level, would be we've been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications," Altman said during a conversation with Matt Comyn, CEO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
In the years following ChatGPT's release, Altman warned that "jobs are definitely going to go away" and that "entire classes" of jobs would vanish. Other AI leaders, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, also predicted that AI could eliminate around 50% of entry-level office jobs.
However, Altman now acknowledges that the feared job apocalypse hasn't materialized. While some tech companies like Block, Snap, and Meta have cited AI in layoff announcements, Altman believes many are using AI as a scapegoat for cuts that would have happened anyway.
Altman emphasized the importance of transparency around AI's potential impact, even if predictions prove incorrect: "It is better for us to be going in the direction of too much transparency and occasionally being wrong."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
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