NEW DELHI — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday that artificial intelligence has not caused the sweeping job losses many had feared, acknowledging that his own earlier concerns about large-scale white-collar job cuts may have been overstated.
Speaking at a conference hosted by Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, Altman said he initially expected AI to eliminate far more entry-level office jobs after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. So far, however, the employment impact has been less severe than he anticipated.
“I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” Altman said during a conversation with CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn.
“I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” he said.
Altman said OpenAI had been “roughly right” about the pace of AI’s technological development, but “pretty wrong” about its broader social and economic effects. He said early warnings about potential job destruction were based on what appeared to be a real risk at the time.
“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,” he said.
His comments come as major companies, including HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, have said some roles are being replaced, reduced or reshaped by AI tools and automation.
Altman said he has come to appreciate that human interaction remains central to many jobs and is not easily replaced by machines. He cited his own experience testing AI-generated replies for Slack and email messages before deciding to resume responding personally.
“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,” Altman added. (Source: IANS)
