OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now says the artificial intelligence boom will not lead to a 'jobs apocalypse,' admitting his earlier predictions on the technology's impact on the job market were incorrect.
Speaking at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney, Altman said OpenAI was 'roughly right' about its technological predictions since launching ChatGPT in 2022, but 'pretty wrong' on social and economic impacts.
Altman had previously forecast AI would compress job turnover to a much shorter window and specifically predicted customer service jobs would be the first to go.
'I'm delighted to be wrong about this,' Altman told CBA CEO Matt Comyn. 'I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.'
Despite ongoing layoffs at companies like Meta and Cisco to fund AI investments, a Gartner report shows businesses see greater benefits from giving staff AI tools to boost efficiency rather than firing them.
Altman noted there remains a 'human part' of employment AI cannot replace, recounting how he tried using AI to respond to messages but reverted to answering some himself because 'we really do care about people.'