- Sam Altman says he doesn’t think artificial intelligence will lead to a ‘job apocalypse’
- OpenAI CEO says human interaction will always be necessary
- Altman says he uses AI to respond to Slack and email messages
Sam Altman has hit out at claims that the increasing global use of AI technology will lead to a “job apocalypse”, despite widespread reports that this is exactly what is happening in many industries.
OpenAI’s CEO also admitted that while he believed his company was “roughly right” in the technological predictions it made when it launched ChatGPT in 2022, they were “pretty wrong” about the social and economic implications.
Altman also noted that while he was initially concerned about the impact AI would have on global employment levels, he believed things were not as bad as many have made out.
“I’m happy to be wrong”
“I’m glad to be wrong about this, I thought it would have had a bigger impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated now than it actually has,” Altman told CBA chief executive Matt Comyn in a virtual interview at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney (via Pakinomist).
“I think now I understand more about why that’s not the case, and of course I’m grateful, but it’s an area where my intuitions were just off,” he added.
“People are like ‘oh, you could have saved the world from a lot of fear talk and a lot of doom and gloom’, but at the time I thought, ‘I can see it’s a real risk, we should probably talk about it’, and it still can.”
Altman’s comments come days after Meta laid off about 8,000 workers following several failed AI-related projects, with many others forced into new AI work.
Banking giant Standard Chartered was also widely criticized recently after its chief executive described workers as ‘less valuable human capital’ shortly after cutting thousands of jobs in favor of AI tools.
Altman also revealed a bit about his use of AI tools for his personal work life, including having it respond to Slack and email messages.
However, he noted that he had returned to answering some himself, as there is still a ‘human element’ of employment that needs to be present.
“I got it to respond to messages saying ‘this is Sam’s AI,’ and that was a great example to me that we really care about people,” he said.
“We really care about our interactions with people, and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something I can imagine outsourcing to an AI anytime soon.”
Altman said those feelings made him realize that human workers will still have a place in most roles going forward.
“It’s really, in both positive and negative ways, updated me to think that the jobs picture is probably going to be a lot different than we thought,” he said.
“I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of job apocalypse that some of the companies in our space are advocating or talking about.”
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