The OpenAI chief, speaking in the Asia-Pacific, walked back the more dramatic predictions of broad employment collapse. The data, so far, agrees with him.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said on Tuesday that artificial intelligence was unlikely to trigger the broad employment collapse that has come to be known, in the industry’s own shorthand, as the jobs apocalypse, even as he conceded that specific categories of work, including customer support, will largely disappear.
The remarks, reported by Reuters from an Asia-Pacific appearance, mark the latest step in a noticeable softening of tone from the executives who, until recently, were the loudest voices warning about AI-driven labour disruption.
Altman himself has spent much of the past year describing customer service jobs as “totally, totally gone” in the near future, and saying that traditional work skills now have a two-to-three year half-life.
The newer framing, repeated across appearances in India, Japan, and South Korea over recent months, draws a different line: significant churn within sectors, yes; an economy-wide collapse in headcount, no. The shift coincides with the absence, so far, of the kind of macro signal that an actual jobs apocalypse would generate.
