“I’m glad to be wrong about this, I thought the elimination of entry-level white-collar jobs would have had a much greater impact than it has now,” he said at the conference, according to Reuters. “Now I think I understand more about why it didn’t happen, and I’m obviously grateful but this is one area where my intuition was just off.”
As a reminder, Altman has been beating the “AI is coming for your job” drum for over a decade. In 2015, he stated, “My job is to help destroy people’s jobs” – a point he regretted but decided he would do just that. In 2023, Altman said in an interview with The Atlantic, “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good; it’s only going to be a complement; it’s never going to be a replacement. Jobs will definitely be lost, full stop.” Even a few months ago, he was claiming that AI would take over 40% of work tasks “in the not-too-distant future.”
Now, if you’re a little cynical – and what reason have you been given to be so? – So you can assume that all the talk of mass job losses was a way for Altman to generate two things: investment from funders who want to be on a machine that takes human labor out of the profit margins and control over extremely powerful technology that only he and his team understand and therefore should have control over.
But you would be wrong, you see. Altman is actually feeling as relieved as anyone else from blowing the whole situation out of proportion. (And there’s no better time to improve your position than when you’ve achieved a valuation of nearly $1 trillion and are headed towards an IPO). “People say ‘Oh, you could have saved the world from a lot of fear-mongering and a lot of destruction and despair’ but at the time I said ‘I think it’s a real risk, we should probably talk about it’ and it still could have happened. [be]” he told the conference.
Recently, Altman’s tone has been changing on the impact of AI on jobs. Earlier this year, he began warning that corporations would use AI as an excuse to make layoffs — which has undoubtedly happened. His company also recently announced a new initiative from the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation that will make $250 million available for grants, partnerships, and direct action aimed at helping workers deal with any disruption caused by the spread of AI.
At this point, it feels like it’s going to be a real uphill battle for OpenAI to overturn its reputation. Even with Altman’s new approach to job losses and pressure from the organization that it is helping workers, OpenAI won’t stop selling its technology to companies that will try to replace human labor with it, nor will it stop bragging about things like its models achieving “PhD-level intelligence.”
At best, the company’s position seems to be this: We really hate how our technology is being used, it’s just a real shame we can’t do anything about it.
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