OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday that the impact of artificial intelligence is unlikely to cause a “jobs apocalypse.”
Altman spoke virtually at the Commonwealth Bank Conferences in Sydney, Australia, where he discussed his initial concerns about entry-level white-collar jobs being taken over by artificial intelligence, Reuters reported.
“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,” Altman told Commonwealth Bank Conferences Matt Comyn in a Tuesday interview, according to the Economic Times.
“I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some companies in our space advocate or talk about,” the CEO said at the Sydney conference according to Reuters.
This comes after the OpenAI chief expressed concerns about jobs in the past. In 2023, in an interview with The Atlantic he said, “jobs are definitely going to go away,” in response to AI impacts, according to Business Insider. When ChatGPT was released in 2022, he claimed that AI was going to cause trouble in the job market.
In 2025, Altman told the Federal Reserve Conference that entire classes of jobs would disappear, the outlet reported.
In February, Altman said that companies were claiming layoffs due to AI, but did not identify the companies, according to Business Insider.
At the same time, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was saying that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs, the outlet reported. Anthropic is the developer of the AI chatbot Claude.
“People are like, ‘Oh, you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at the time ‘I was like I see this is a real risk, we should probably talk about it’ and still may,” said Altman, according to the Economic Times.
Altman says OpenAI wants to be transparent about the technological changes and what that could mean in the future, even if they are wrong.
“We can’t afford to take the psychological convenient option of pretending that the changes were all way off in the future,” Altman said according to CommBank Newsroom.
“Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than many businesses, institutions, and societies can adopt it, creating a new leadership challenge: how to be transparent about what is changing while staying agile enough to respond,” the OpenAI CEO told to CommBank.
Altman says his executives have been right on the technological implications of artificial intelligence but pretty wrong on the social and economic implications, the Economic Times reported.
“I believe that so much of society here is going to be impacted by this, that we are all stakeholders, and it is better for us to be going in the direction of too much transparency and occasionally being wrong,” the CEO said at the Commonwealth Bank Conference.
OpenAI is preparing to file for a confidential initial public offering (IPO) in the coming weeks, Reuters reported. The company is hoping for a $1 trillion valuation.
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