OpenAI's Sam Altman says artificial intelligence unlikely to lead to 'jobs apocalypse'

Amid layoffs at some of the world's biggest companies and growing fears of further job losses due to the adoption of artificial intelligence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the technology would not lead to a global "jobs apocalypse".

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

Wrong about AI's social, economic implications

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 delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened," Altman told CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn.

"I now think I understand more about why it hasn't, and I'm obviously grateful but that is an area where my intuitions were just 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 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.

How Altman is using AI

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."

Layoffs triggered by AI

Altman’s comments come days after Meta laid off nearly 8000 employees as the social media giant continues its push towards AI.

A growing number of global companies, including HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered and CBA have announced some jobs within their companies were being replaced by AI.

Last week, Bill Winters, the CEO of Standard Chartered PLC came under fire after announcing plans to cut about 7,800 back-office roles, primarily in response to AI.

“It’s not cost-cutting,” he said. “It’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in.”