Sam Altman Would Like the Record to Show AI Will Not Take Your Job (Despite Everything He's Said Previously)

Sam Altman is calling off the jobs apocalypse, so please put your molotov cocktails away. In a recent appearance at a conference hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CEO of OpenAI admitted that his previous warnings about mass job loss and societal upheaval were incorrect. (Well, maybe not totally incorrect, but that societal upheaval is more directed at him than he’d like, and now he’s trying to do some crisis management). He’s also very happy about being wrong, by the way, don’t forget that part! “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,” he told the conference, according to Reuters. “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.” As a reminder, Altman has been banging the “AI is coming for your job” drum for more than a decade now. In 2015, he pointed out, “My job is to help people destroy jobs”—something he lamented but decided he’d just do anyway. In 2023, Altman said in an interview with The Altantic, “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s o