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The artificial intelligence boom will not lead to a “jobs apocalypse”, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday, admitting his own previous predictions on the technology’s impact on the job market were incorrect.
Speaking in Sydney at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference, he said he was “roughly right” about the technological predictions OpenAI made when it launched ChatGPT in 2022. But he said they were “pretty wrong” on the social and economic impact, Reuters reported.
Altman had previously predicted that AI could compress the historical rate of job turnover – normally around 50% of jobs changing every 75 years – into a much shorter window.
He also previously said AI would take customer service jobs first, saying he was “confident that a lot of current customer support that happens over a phone or computer, those people will lose their jobs”.
“I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” Altman told CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn in an interview. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.
“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.”
Technology companies, including Meta, announced job cuts last week to become more AI-focused.
In May, Cisco confirmed that it would fire roughly 4,000 employees, and the company’s CEO, Chuck Robbins, wrote in a blog post: “The companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest.”
A report from technology insights company Gartner found that although 80% of executives admit to eliminating staff to invest more in AI, data shows businesses seeing more benefits from giving their staff AI tools to boost efficiency, rather than firing them.
However, Altman said on Tuesday that despite AI entering the workforce, there was still a ‘human part’ of employment that could not be replaced.
He said that for email messages and Slack he had used AI to respond to messages but had gone back 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.