Two of the most influential CEOs in tech spent the last year warning that AI would gut white-collar employment. Now they’re admitting they were wrong, joining other leaders like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon in casting doubt on an AI job apocalypse.
“I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” Altman told Comyn. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.”
Altman added that he’s taken a lot of flack for his hype, but better safe than sorry.”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 it still may.”
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly preparing to launch their respective IPOs this year, each company with an estimated valuation of $1 trillion.
Now he says the displacement he feared simply hasn’t materialized, and a personal experiment reinforced it. He tried delegating his Slack and email responses to AI, then began responding to come again manually.
“We really do care about our interactions with people,” he said. “This thing…is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon. It really updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought.”
