OpenAI CEO admits he overestimated AI’s impact on white-collar jobs

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday, May 26, that the rapid development and adoption of artificial intelligence is unlikely to trigger a global “jobs apocalypse,” adding that the technology has not displaced as many white-collar workers as he had previously feared.

Speaking virtually at a conference hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) in Sydney, Altman reflected on earlier concerns about the potential impact of AI on global employment levels. He noted that while OpenAI had been “roughly right” in its technological forecasts since launching ChatGPT in 2022, it had been “pretty wrong” in predicting the social and economic consequences, as per Reuters.

"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," Altman said in an interview with CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn.

"I now think I understand more about why it hasn't, and I'm obviously grateful but that is an area where my intuitions were just off.

"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."

Although Altman did not provide specific employment figures, he acknowledged that he had previously warned about potential industry-wide job losses driven by AI advancements.

Several major global companies—including HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered, and CBA—have announced that certain roles within their organisations are being replaced or reshaped by AI technologies.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly preparing to confidentially file for a U.S. initial public offering in the coming weeks, according to Reuters. The company could be targeting a valuation of around $1 trillion and aiming to raise at least $60 billion.

Altman said his perspective has evolved as he observed how AI integrates into day-to-day work. Despite AI taking on a growing role across industries, he emphasized that a critical “human part” of many jobs remains irreplaceable.

He shared a personal example, explaining that he had experimented with using AI to respond to Slack and email messages, but later chose to handle some communications 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 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."

This experience, he said, reinforced his belief that human interaction is central to many forms of work and unlikely to be fully replaced by automation.

"It really, in both positive and negative ways, updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought," Altman said.

"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."

By Tamilla Hasanova