Sam Altman Is Walking Back “Job Apocalypse” Prediction… So Which Is It?

AI? More like AAAAAAAHHHHH (I)!

There have been a lot of predictions hailing the end of work as we know it, thanks to AI.

Just this month, Microsoft AI’s CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, predicted that all white-collar workers would disappear in 18 months. Goldman Sachs just released data showing that AI has eliminated 16,000 jobs this year. And in February, the creator of Claude Code said manager and coder jobs will effectively merge because AI coding will be so easy.

And OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was firmly on that doomsday bandwagon, saying last year, “A lot of jobs will go away.”

But just this week, he seems to have changed his tune.

“I’m delighted to ⁠be wrong about this,” Altman said in an interview with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened.”

But despite the admission, he doesn’t regret his tubthumping.

“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 [happen].”

And Altman’s insight comes from experience. Recently, he outsourced his Slack and email replies to AI, then quickly reverted to doing it himself.

“We really do care about our interactions with people,” he said. “[It’s] not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon. It really updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought.”

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But Saltman’s not the only CEO to walk back their AI prediction.

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei previously said that AI could eliminate half of white-collar jobs, like Thanos snapping his fingers. But now he’s saying that AI will increase the amount of work people can do, not removing jobs at all.

“If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job. And the 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10-times their productivity.”

You follow all that?

Meanwhile, Goldman Sach’s CEO David Solomon has been saying from the start that the panic is way out of proportion. He points to historical examples of industrial change, such as the move to electricity in the 1900s and the digital revolution in the 1990s.

“The United States has a long track record of creating new jobs in response to disruption… I don’t see any reason to think this dynamic will stop now.”

So what’s actually going to happen?

Are we looking at the end of work as we know it, or will the global economy adapt and change? Or maybe it’ll be somewhere between the two.

Whatever actually happens, no one knows the future, and all we can do is find out the (hopefully) not-so-hard way.