Sam Altman thought AI would have eaten more jobs by now. It hasn’t, and he’s surprisingly upfront about the miss.
Speaking at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Accelerate AI conference on May 26, the OpenAI CEO acknowledged that his earlier predictions about AI’s impact on the workforce were off the mark. Entry-level white-collar positions, the roles most commonly flagged as vulnerable after ChatGPT launched in 2022, have proven more resilient than he anticipated.
“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.”
The ‘jobs apocalypse’ that didn’t arrive
Altman described himself as “pretty wrong” about the social impacts of AI. Previous projections suggested that as many as 40% of jobs could be automated by 2030. The reality, at least so far, looks considerably less dramatic.
