OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said job losses from advances in artificial intelligence are unlikely to be as severe as expected.
According to Reuters, Altman said at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney, Australia, on the 26th that "AI will not lead to a so-called 'jobs apocalypse.'"
In his speech, Altman said OpenAI's leadership was concerned in 2022, when ChatGPT was released, about the impact AI would have on global employment. He said their expectations for the pace of AI's technological progress "were largely right," but they were "very wrong" about the social and economic impact.
He added, "By now, we expected to see a shock where more entry-level office jobs with low barriers to entry would disappear," and said, "I think we now better understand why that has not happened. I'm grateful, but this is an area where my intuition was completely off."
He also predicted that while AI is taking on more roles across industries, work that requires human-to-human interaction will not be easily replaced. He also shared an experience of delegating his email and message responses to AI and then taking them back to handle himself.
Previously, major figures in U.S. big tech argued that advances in AI would trigger large-scale job losses, especially among office workers. Altman had repeatedly emphasized in the past that AI's development could cause job reductions across industries.
In May last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs within one to five years, and in October last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also said "AI and robots will replace all jobs," adding that AI would make human labor "optional."