In a virtual Sydney conference, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted the feared “jobs apocalypse” from artificial intelligence (AI) has not materialized, commenting that there were fewer white-collar losses than expected, admitting that he was wrong, somehow.
Sam Altman’s mea culpa: Why the AI job crash is not here (yet)
Speaking with Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)’s CEO, Altman confessed he and his team were “pretty wrong” about AI’s near term social and economic impact. While their tech predictions for ChatGPT were “roughly right,” the doomsday job scenario hasn’t arrived.
“I’m delighted to be wrong,” he said. Entry-level white-collar roles (which he thought would be decimated) remain largely intact. Instead, Altman discovered something almost ironic: people still want humans. He tried using AI to reply to Slack and email, but reverted to answering himself because “we really do care about our interactions with people.”
The real job killers: AI washing and profit margins
But wait; what about the massive May tech layoffs? Meta cut 8,000 roles, Oracle slashed thousands, and Amazon trimmed 16,000. AI gets the blame, but economists call it “AI washing.” Altman himself confirmed some companies use AI as a convenient smokescreen to recover from pandemic over-hiring and satisfy Wall Street’s profit demands.
Like a magician hiding a trick, firms point to automation while very quietly axing jobs they would have cut anyway. Freshworks bragged that AI generates half its code, but that’s efficiency, not an apocalypse.
At the same time, and in the same conference, CBA’s CEO Matt Comyn commented that AI is already reshaping the workforce. That is not a hidden truth. Comyn added that AI will indeed “take away jobs at businesses across the economy,” and it is the companies’ responsibility to help their employees plan for what’s to come, a rapidly changing future.
“At CBA, as in many large organizations, some work will be done by smaller teams. At the same time, some career paths will steepen as people use AI to take on more complex work sooner. This will create opportunities for many people, but it will be demanding for everyone,” Comyn added.
What we’re missing: The human part is stubborn
Here is the big plot twist that even Altman didn’t see coming at first: in so many jobs, humans are basically the emotional glue that keeps everything from falling apart. Think about it; a plumber doesn’t just patch up a leaky pipe; they are also there to calm down a stressed-out homeowner. A therapist is not just a sounding board; they are reading all those tiny cues in your silences that a machine would totally miss. And teachers? They spot a kid struggling way before a hand even goes up.
Sure, an AI can churn out a decent legal doc in seconds, but it’s never going to argue a case in court with actual fire in its belly or manage to negotiate a tricky ceasefire over a cup of coffee. We see this all the time; we live it.
Altman’s starting to realize that the “human element” of work is way more stubborn and irreplaceable than he thought, which is exactly why he’s swapped his old doomsday vibes for some genuine, cautious optimism about our future.