Sam Altman and Dario Amodei walk back their AI job apocalypse predictions, just in time for billion-dollar IPOs.
Business magazine Fortune traces how both CEOs have shifted their tone over the past few weeks. In an interview with Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said: "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."
Just last June, Altman had warned that entire job categories could vanish. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went even further, calling half of all white-collar jobs at risk. Now Amodei frames automation as a productivity multiplier: "If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job" - which then scales back to 100 percent and boosts productivity tenfold.
Both companies are preparing IPOs with trillion-dollar valuations. The Yale Budget Lab has found no major shifts in jobs most exposed to AI so far. A separate study fits the picture: the job crisis among coders, writers, and other AI-exposed workers started before ChatGPT launched. That suggests simple narratives about a direct AI job apocalypse don't hold up, at least not yet.
