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Sam Altman, chief executive officer (CEO) of artificial intelligence<\/a> (AI) startup OpenAI, has reportedly walked back his earlier prediction that AI is causing widespread job losses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Speaking with CNBC <\/i>on Monday, Altman argued that companies embracing AI are often the same ones hiring more workers, whereas firms that continue to blame AI for layoffs <\/a>may not be using the technology extensively.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He said, “The companies that I know that have adopted AI the most are also the ones hiring the most,” and added, “And the companies, as a general rule, that are talking about doing layoffs because of AI are the ones adopting AI the least.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He made these remarks before celebrating the official groundbreaking of a massive, one-gigawatt data centre 50 miles southwest of Detroit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Altman added that AI can be a \u201cconvenient way\u201d for companies to explain layoffs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The OpenAI <\/a>CEO has backtracked on his previous statements in which he said that entire job categories could be wiped out by artificial intelligence. Back in 2025, he told Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman that “some areas” in the job market would be “just like totally, totally gone” as they are replaced by AI agents. In the same year, he also suggested that the types of jobs being slashed or transformed by AI may not be considered “real work” in the long run.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He further said that he remains unsure how the new technology will ultimately affect employment, but added that his view has become more optimistic after watching companies adopt OpenAI’s coding tools, including Codex<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n “I think I underestimated how jagged these models are going to be,” he said. “They do some things incredibly well, but they don’t do kind of the long-term, complex task supervision well at all.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n According to a Business Insider<\/i> report, Altman’s remarks come at a time when employees are increasingly worried about what generative AI will mean for white-collar jobs. Some of the tech industry’s own leaders, including Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman and Anthropic <\/a>CEO Dario Amodei, have previously warned that artificial intelligence could replace many employees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nAltman backtracks on AI-driven job cuts<\/h2>\n
Altman turns optimistic<\/h2>\n
Anxiety over AI replacing jobs skyrockets<\/h2>\n