Sam Altman admitted he had overestimated the social and economic impacts of AI in 2022 but the size of the blow to the labour market remains unclear
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Chris Dorrell, Technology Business Correspondent
The Times
Sam Altman said that artificial intelligence is unlikely to cause a “jobs apocalypse” because it struggles to replicate the distinctly human aspects of work.
The chief executive of OpenAI also said he had overestimated the social and economic impacts of AI when ChatGPT was launched in 2022, saying his predictions had been “pretty wrong”.
“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,” he said at an event in Australia. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about.”
Altman added that his own use of AI to reply to messages on Slack had reinforced the importance of the human elements of work. “I had it reply to messages, saying ‘this is Sam’s AI’ and it was an amazing example to me of we really do care about people,” he said.
“We really do care about our interactions with people and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon.
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“I now think I understand more about why it hasn’t [replaced more jobs], and I’m obviously grateful but that is an area where my intuitions were just off.”
Altman has previously suggested that entire categories of jobs, such as customer support roles, would be replaced by AI. Other tech bosses have also warned that AI could lead to mass unemployment. Last year, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry level white-collar jobs and cause unemployment to spike to 10-20 per cent within the next five years.
While the wider impact on the labour market is still unclear, a number of big businesses have announced job cuts connected to AI in recent weeks. Standard Chartered has said that it will use AI to replace “lower-value human capital,” with around 7,800 back-office roles, or about 15 per cent of the workforce, set to be cut by the end of the decade.
Meta started another major round of layoffs last week, cutting 8,000 roles, or 10 per cent of its headcount. Amazon, Microsoft and Jack Dorsey’s Block have all announced major rounds of job cuts this year too. According to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts in the tech sector, over 140 companies have laid off more than 111,000 employees this year.
Although it is still too early to get a detailed picture of the impact on the labour market, research from Goldman Sachs suggests that roles which are easier to substitute with AI, such as telephone operators and financial administrators, have seen an increase in job losses.
The Wall Street bank estimated that AI has reduced monthly payroll growth by roughly 25,000 and raised the unemployment rate by 0.16 percentage points in the US over the last year. In the same period, it has only helped to add 9,000 positions, and lowered the jobless rate by 0.06 percentage points.