CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman
| Photo Credit:
Manuel Orbegozo
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday the rapid development and adoption of AI would not lead
to a global “jobs apocalypse” and the technology had not claimed
as many white-collar jobs as he had feared.
Speaking at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)
conference in Sydney, Altman said he was initially concerned
about the impact AI would have on global employment levels.
He said he and his executives had been “roughly right” on
the technological predictions made by OpenAI when it launched
ChatGPT in 2022. But he said they were “pretty wrong” on the
social and economic implications.
“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 told CBA
Chief Executive Matt Comyn in an interview.
“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.”
Altman did not cite any jobs numbers on Tuesday but has
previously talked about potential industry-wide job cuts due to
AI’s advancement.
A growing number of global companies, including HSBC
, Amazon, Standard Chartered and CBA
have announced some jobs within their companies were
being replaced by AI.
OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file for a U.S.
initial public offering in the coming weeks, Reuters reported
last week, citing a source familiar with the matter. The company
could be aiming for a $1 trillion valuation and raising at least
$60 billion, Reuters reported in October.
‘HUMAN PART’ OF EMPLOYMENT IRREPLACEABLE
Altman said he had realised that even though AI was taking
on an increasingly active role in many industries and jobs,
there was still a ‘human part’ of employment that could not be
replaced.
He said he had been using AI to respond to Slack and email
messages but had reverted to answering some 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.”
That realisation, he said, had made him believe the human
interaction required in many jobs would not be replaced by AI.
“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,” he 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.”
Published on May 26, 2026
