Sam Altman just said something you don’t hear from AI CEOs very often: I was wrong.
Speaking at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney on Monday, the OpenAI CEO admitted that the AI-driven job destruction he himself had predicted simply hasn’t materialized. His exact words: ‘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.‘
What he used to say
This is notable because Altman used to tell a very different story. He had predicted that AI would compress the historical rate of job turnover — normally about 50% of jobs changing every 75 years — into a much shorter window. He was ‘confident’ that customer service jobs would be the first to go.
Now he says his technology predictions were ‘roughly right’ but his calls on social and economic impact were ‘pretty wrong.’ He expected more entry-level white-collar jobs to have vanished by now — and he’s grateful they haven’t.
Why this matters
There’s always a ‘human part’ of work that AI simply can’t replace, Altman said. That’s an almost humble statement from someone building the most powerful AI in the world.
But listen carefully: he’s not saying jobs are safe. He’s saying the disruption is coming slower than expected. That’s an important distinction. The transformation is happening — it just needs more time, and it looks different from what the headlines suggested.
What strikes me about this story is how it shows that even the people closest to the technology can’t predict its social consequences. That should make all of us a bit more humble — optimists and pessimists alike.
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