Sam Altman Says AI Job Fears May Have Been Overblown

New Delhi- Sam Altman on Tuesday said the rapid growth of artificial intelligence is unlikely to lead to the large-scale jobs crisis many had feared, admitting that his earlier predictions about widespread white-collar job losses may have been exaggerated.

Speaking at a conference hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, the OpenAI chief said he initially believed AI tools like ChatGPT would eliminate a significant number of entry-level white-collar jobs soon after the chatbot’s launch in 2022.

However, Altman acknowledged that the real-world impact on employment has so far been far less dramatic than expected.

“I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” Altman said during a discussion with CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.”

He noted that while OpenAI had accurately predicted the pace of AI development, it had misjudged how society and workplaces would respond to the technology.

Altman explained that earlier warnings about job losses were driven by what seemed like a genuine threat at the time. “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,” he said.

His comments come as several multinational companies, including HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, have acknowledged that AI-powered automation is reshaping or replacing certain job roles.

Despite this, Altman stressed that human connection continues to play a vital role in many professions and cannot easily be replaced by machines.

Sharing a personal experience, he said he once experimented with AI-generated replies for Slack messages and emails but later returned to writing responses himself.

“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.”

With inputs from IANS