Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walking-back-ai-jobs-apocalypse-prophecies-ipo/

by ianrahman • 2 months ago

236 176 2 months ago

Analemma_• 2 months ago

Of course, the fact that the statements they made confidently for years are now hastily getting undone in the face of public backlash only further cements their reputation as snakes who can't be trusted farther than one can throw a bowling ball. For a while there I actually respected Amodei for sticking to his guns on the job loss thing, it seemed like it was his genuinely-held belief and he was going to keep saying the truth even if it was unpopular, but never mind.

NateEag• 2 months ago

Is it possible Amodei has revised his opinion after his predictions were empirically proved false?

I haven't looked at how long he's been predicting job destruction, so I don't know if that explanation fits the facts.

bcrosby95• 2 months ago

As a general rule the least charitable interpretation of a CEO's words are probably the most accurate. Considering the increasing backlash against AI this sounds more like a PR move than a change in actual belief.

papichulo2023• 2 months ago

It is kinda funny the irony of going from "we are going to replace devs" to "we <3 devs, keep burning those tokens"

zuzululu• 2 months ago

I don't think its as big of a deal as its made out to be. They are human after all and have overestimated the capabilities of LLMs. What's more important is that this signals product market fit.

winfredJa• 2 months ago

They are backpedaling because AI backlash is slowing down their data center builds.

SirFatty• 2 months ago

"They are human after all.."

Hahaha! Good one!

freejazz• 2 months ago

They are human after all and have overestimated the capabilities of LLMs

They self-servingly overinflated the capabilities and now its coming to roost.

sublinear• 2 months ago

There are many humans without any skin in the game that accurately estimated the capabilities of LLMs.

It has nothing to do with "being human". This wasn't about finding "product market fit" either. It was about griftin' while the gettin' was good. That certainly is "human".

philipov• 2 months ago

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

sumeno• 2 months ago

I seriously doubt their actual beliefs* have changed in the slightest. They just see which way the wind is blowing with public sentiment and are trying to do damage control.

*I doubt they HAVE actual beliefs. Their entire job is managing PR and convincing investors.

windexh8er4• 2 months ago

No. This is a ridiculous take on the recklessness Altman and Amodei have stated. Both men flat out lied, kept lying and continue to lie about their numbers and capabilities. They have literally destroyed markets that aren't coming back anytime soon (consumer hardware). They should be held accountable, not let off the hook like "Oh well, they fucked our economy long term. Guess they're just human."

Literally fuck them and an oversimplification like this.

frays• 2 months ago

the irony of going from "we are going to replace devs" to "we <3 devs, keep burning those tokens"

This is so true. Nicely put.

dbvn• 2 months ago

the damage is done. Why did they ever think it was a good idea to brag that they were going to destroy all middle/upper class jobs?

anthomtb• 2 months ago

To market their product to c-suite people.

reducesuffering• 2 months ago

They were being earnest. People can't handle the truth, so now they're doing PR comms.

energy123• 2 months ago

Because it helps to raise capital at low costs if your investors and creditors think you're going to replace all labor.

dyauspitr• 2 months ago

Because that was the truth. Now they have learned they are going to have to lie to the people so the masses can be sleepwalked to the same eventuality.

solumunus• 2 months ago

I suppose we’ll see.

vrganj• 2 months ago

Class blindness. Their buddies all love the idea of showing pesky workers their place.

sbayg• 2 months ago

Because the people who funded them from the outset did so because that was their goal? The destroy all jobs talk started at least 10 years ago, it many ways that hype is the actual product itself.

ks2048• 2 months ago

That brag seems tame compared to saying there is a decent change they'll end the human race.

blitzar• 2 months ago

They won't be trillionaires with that attitude. They could have kept saying the line "Ai will replace all the jobs by the end of the year" for another 20 years.

iammjm• 2 months ago

That’s the Elon Musk spirit!

analogpixel2• 2 months ago

These Ai's will be full self driving next year.

postalrat• 2 months ago

Well that is the goal!

beepbopboopp• 2 months ago

If you think there is even a 2% chance you're going to need a government bailout over the next decade, you simply cant be calling your product the grim reaper.

pessimizer• 2 months ago

Especially when the chance they'll get that bailout is around 99.9999999%. That bag has already been got. Doesn't matter if AI ultimately turns out to be useless for anything but children's toys because the productivity it adds to IT work is exactly offset by the amount of bugs it both adds and has to find.

The psychopaths that are pushing it will be arguing over who gets to be president of the world in 2044. This arguing will not be done in any public forum, but over a grouptext.

eloisius• 2 months ago

“Companies that use AI well will replace the ones that don’t”

I’d type that in alternating caps but I’m on mobile.

SequoiaHope• 2 months ago

Ah you just gotta google for such things https://www.textartie.com/alternating-case/

citrin_ru• 2 months ago

A significant job loss will trigger a deep recession which will eventually hit most AI customers so they will have too few customers to be profitable. The best (for AI business) scenario is when productivity is increased without mass unemployment.

PearlRiver2• 2 months ago

If this means universal basic income the GOP will kill themselves in apoplectic rage!

an0malous• 2 months ago

They're trying to pivot to something that would inspire the retail investor they need to pass the bag to as they gear up for IPO, something out of Elon's playbook like "AI will take us to Alpha Centauri by 2030" or "AI will cure cancer by the end of the year"

CodeCompost• 2 months ago

I have to admit LLMs are actually quite useful at generating code for me, but I am experienced enough to know what I want. I use it as a next-generation autocomplete.

elliotec• 2 months ago

This is the "whole thing" in a nutshell for me too. It's useful, speeds some things up, but I've been doing this a long time.

The state-of-the-art or medium-term future of the tooling doesn't feel apocalyptic in itself, but the macro forces, implications of scaling, and general reactions to it on all sides are a different story.

tills13• 2 months ago

It's apocalyptic to the people who previously clocked in, did mediocre work, and clocked out. For those of us willing to put in a little effort, it's just another tool. Though I think there's still a disconnect at the managerial level where they think firing half the team and giving the rest AI is going to 10x revenue.

okasaki• 2 months ago

The scam was that the US needed private industry to bootstrap technology that's mostly going to be used for surveillance analysis and building kill matrices.

josefritzishere• 2 months ago

That's very real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix

booleandilemma• 2 months ago

CEOs aren't a big enough target market. They need their slop machines to appeal to the masses as well. I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing more advertising with that in mind, something like the ads Apple has but marketing their AI.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm• 2 months ago

Saying people are going to lose jobs at least sounded like we were at the cusp of something special. Now it just seems like we are going to get Opus 4.8.1 that supposedly helps somehow according to benchmarks.

Guess they have found their market and this is it.

0xbadcafebee• 2 months ago

To recap: 1) they developed and heavily pushed a technology they thought would result in mass unemployment, 2) they now believe they are wrong, so the market/government should definitely support their company going public. Which means that they were both intending to tank the economy and take your job away, and they were also wrong in their predictions, and now want to be rewarded for both with more money.

datakan2• 2 months ago

It's almost like their business model was written by ChatGPT back when it was telling people to put rocks on pizza

ncr100• 2 months ago

Kind of tells me something about Money, that these are some of the richest people on the planet.

I'm not sure what exactly .. but throwing any random idea against the wall and seeing what sticks, ethics be damned, seems to be the common thread.

tunesmith5• 2 months ago

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them."

It's also amazing how hidden some of these realities were before. Like, you assign a ticket to a developer - in the past they just wanted to know the developer was working on it and didn't care so much which work was what. They'd probably be so surprised to find out that a large percentage of implementation was deriving exactly what was meant by the jira ticket or the specification or the product person's intent. Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM. But now there's this pressure to believe that the developers only do the implementation part that the LLMs do, so they can pretend there will be major efficiency improvements. And it's really hard to explain to them what it is that developers even do.

I know I'm not saying anything new here, but at least where I'm working all of these matters feel much more present than they did months ago.

datakan2• 2 months ago

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price.

Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity.

I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.

andy99• 2 months ago

  I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment.

We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environments, and making it impossible to actually get work out of people. We’re seeing a correction now.

heathrow83829• 2 months ago

i think it's more about cutting costs. Usually, cutting costs when there is opportunity to do so is a lot easier than growing revenue.

ravenstine2• 2 months ago

They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your business is a part of your own community is pretty much gone. In a society with a decreasingly coherent morality, nothing matters more than cash flow, and there are many ways to make cash flow besides making a good product at a fair price. In an immoral society, leadership benefits from attributed success but suffers not from its failures. Society has given up on accountability beyond a certain scale. The petite bourgeoisie might be punished for misleading the public or screwing its employees, but beyond that it seems we let leaders get away with quite a bit.

And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a necessary evil. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.

tunesmith5• 2 months ago

I think there's something else psychological going on. What you describe is a rational approach based off of bad values. But I think I'm also seeing something weirdly irrational.

It's like an (emotional) depression or something. Scarcity thinking, the inability to think expansively. People are so sure that everything around them is shrinking that they feel an instinct to hunker down, shrink, and cut as well. Like it doesn't occur to them that they don't have to feel that way. The execs I work with, none of them strike me as spreadsheet-driven greedy people. They seem more freaked out than that.

broknbottle• 2 months ago

Jack Welch Disciples

wyclif• 2 months ago

It's the opposite of a growth mentality

But to the captains of industry, this is the growth mentality. It's growth--- but only for them, not for the hoi polloi.

FloorEgg• 2 months ago

That's exactly right.

I hav set up a system where customer success and sales can drop in artifacts of customers talking about what they value (emails, transcripts, etc) and skills analyS them and then use them to add context to issues in the backlog.

The idea is that everything in the backlog is tied to an explanation of who it benefits and how it benefits them. We're using AI to merge multiple sources and automate the writing of it. The hope is it streamlines that communication. Our backlog issues now are 3-4 pages that explain very clearly why the issue matters, what it's higher level goal is, etc.

At first engineering was like "woa that's a lot of text" but after reading it was then "that's the best written issue I've ever seen".

Okay, so cool we are streamlining product management and setting ourselves up to automate customer feedback to development pipeline, dramatically cutting down on that issue discernment bottleneck you're pointing at...

..except today I found an issue with critical hallucinations in it. It mixed up what the customer said and what the cs rep said, to the extent that the issue was just straight up incorrect. This was with Opus 3.7 extended thinking. (Mind you it was a big transcript and pushing the limits of context window, loading multiple skills, etc)

So there's some serious potential, but it's just not there yet. Even if all this works flawlessly, the context these models can hold at once is like 0.1% of what a human can (if not less). So we will still need the humans for quite a while to make the harder decisions.

This is in a very leading edge startup pushing the limits of what LLMs can do... And even in this context optimized for LLM success it's still no where close to replacing people. We get a ton of value out of LLMs, but let me clarify that the hold up isn't just fact checking, it goes way beyond that.

In some ways I keep thinking it comes down to context management. Humans can hold so many orders of magnitude more context. Context is the bottleneck. The tech is a long way off being capable enough, and even when it is, there will be lots of operational and cultural obstacles to getting the right context into the AI.

And then there is the jevons paradox consideration...

It feels like we are a long way off. It seems plausible a generation from now employment will look very different, and I can kind of grasp how we get there, but I'm extremely skeptical of any unemployment apocalypse on a 5 year time horizon being triggered by AI. Maybe an unrelated economic shock, but not AI.

crystal_revenge3• 2 months ago

"But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them."

I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, learn from each round and iterate on the process. Multiple times it has lead to a needle moving change with no need for human intervention.

There are, of course, many cases where this is not true, but they're certainly more capable than I had previously thought and can solve an increasingly large range of problems on their own.

Reading the comments here is like glimpsing in to either the past or an alternate timeline.

There's tons of inertia in the system so don't expect change to happen over night, but reading "AI won't replace jobs" today feels a lot like when I used to hear "nobody will purchase things online!" back in the mid 1990s.

r4dd• 2 months ago

These posts are so boring lmao.

if you really believe this, quit the yapping and concentrate your portfolio for direct and indirect exposure to all frontier AI projects.

adamiscool8• 2 months ago

Can you give a specific example, ideally that would not have been solved by people-hours amounting to less than the token costs?

smallnix• 2 months ago

I routinely have them design their own experiment loops,

Exactly, so that's the person required in the dev loop. You directed it, a person.

tunesmith5• 2 months ago

I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of.

Who cares that you've had multiple instances? Everyone has had multiple instances. The question is whether that happens in EVERY instance. Because when someone's laid off, that's what the exec believes, that the person isn't needed at all.

I'm not arguing that AI won't replace jobs - it's clear that jobs are already disappearing "because of AI". I'm not even arguing that it is immoral (even though it is). I'm arguing that it is short-sighted and unwise.

itemize123• 2 months ago

if it helps - i strongly agree with you

chrsw• 2 months ago

Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.

fg3fg• 2 months ago

Earnings growth, cash flows and valuation.

Thats all the management at firms care about.

Sorry for all the dev's here who rant about productivity gains but forget what matters to who employs them in the first place!

tunesmith5• 2 months ago

In practice, it's more like companies want to spend money on AI because they believe it will save money somewhere else. If instead they see extra cost, then they get all confused. They can't bring themselves to believe that in their particular case maybe the benefit isn't worth the cost; they're axiomatically conditioned to believe they have to keep using it, and so therefore they have to make cuts somewhere else. It's insane.

I went through this personally. I had a glut of project ideas I wanted to get through. I signed up for the $200/month thing. I caught up. My agent sat idle. It was hard to decide to cut my plan. I felt initial pressure to search and hunt for other ideas to code, ideas that were pretty stupid. I finally downscaled my plan; I got hold of myself. But that's easier to do for an individual than it is for a company.

In normal economic theory it's easier to understand. You're at a particular scale. You have the opportunity to automate, but does it make sense for you? I could go out and buy a riding mower right now, but my lawn is less than a quarter acre. The riding mower lets me scale up, but I don't have something that can benefit from it.

thunky2• 2 months ago

it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens

I'll pay for my own tokens if it means can work one hour per day instead of 8.

senectus1• 2 months ago

"Sure they can, we can just ask them."

I'm convinced this is in large part because of the anthropomorphism of AI.

AI is not people, the moment you start treating it as people you start believing and thinking of it as people and you now take the human safety check out of the loop.

If you take the human out of the loop you have an unsecured weapon/dangerous object on the loose. anything from excel spreadsheets through to actual weapons. it all needs a human in the loop.

dorgo• 2 months ago

Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM

why not let the LLM derive what exactly was meant by the Jira ticket? I get lazy lately and if the LLM sounds like it understands the ticket I don't question it.

halamadrid• 2 months ago

They both hired some good publicists who is advising that change your tone and messaging to get the public to like and trust the companies.

Initially the goal was to convince investors which is pretty much done and now its the retail/public that will value these companies once they IPO. Either way the job market is definitely impacted and is changing rapidly.

Will one of these companies be the first to hit 10 trillion valuation?

simonw7• 2 months ago

OK, this is weird. The article says:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk.

But the link to the interview goes to this 2m11s YouTube video, and he doesn't use say anything of the sort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg

Here's a full MacWhisper transcript (easier to search than the YouTube one): https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027...

UPDATE: It turns out the article was linking to a short highlights video, but the interview itself was 45 minutes long.

I don't think the full video is available anywhere, so it's hard to confirm that "pretty wrong" quote.

This Reuters story carries the same quotes and, unlike the linked Fortune article, doesn't sit behind a paywall: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...

foolswisdom• 2 months ago

There's a partial corresponding quote at https://www.commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2026/05/sam-al....

simonw7• 2 months ago

That's a better link, thanks. Not much substance there about this though!

One of the areas where he personally had been wide of the mark was on AI’s short-term impact on entry-level white-collar jobs, which had not been nearly as bad as he had once predicted, he said. “I’m delighted to be wrong about that.”

I'm not sure that justifies a whole "Sam Altman ... walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions" headline, personally. It's pretty thin.

But... we still haven't seen the full interview, so there might be more to it. The Fortune article also includes:

Altman added that he’s taken a lot of flack for his hype, but better safe than sorry.”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.”

cactusplant7374• 2 months ago

Altman has said he thought AI would have a bigger impact.

windexh8er4• 2 months ago

For those that write and shill for these orgs, almost full time, I could see how this type of admission is damning.

simonw7• 2 months ago

I don't understand what you're saying here.

(Personally I would love to see Sam and Dario credibly walk back their jobs doomerism talk, but I don't think the facts match the headline in this case.)

b0sk• 2 months ago

This feels orchestrated (someone made a phone call to them). Look at this a16z tweet : https://x.com/a16z/status/2059687657840713925?s=20

treis2• 2 months ago

That is one confusing chart

metalliqaz• 2 months ago

Public sentiment has turned strongly against them. They can try to take it back, but I don't think they will be successful. Nobody is buying the fiction anymore. Everyone knows that any proceeds from the technology will not be shared. The ownership class will take everything and leave the ecological impact to be dealt with by the same people they laid off.

guestbest• 2 months ago

In every AI prediction there is an obvious underestimating of the actual difficulties faced by workers and planners so the tool to automate those intelligent tasks always way underperform what a person is capable of with the notable exception of merging the automation with human tasks as an augment. And that is a totally ‘nother topic. But thanks for the investment money.

simonw7• 2 months ago

Fortune articles are behind a paywall, which makes them a bad fit for Hacker News.

This Reuters story carries a similar idea: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...

I'd warn that this all looks pretty thin - there are a couple of partially supporting quotes from a 45 minute virtual conversation Sam had with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference on Tuesday, but they don't look strong enough to me support the "walking back AI jobs apocalypse" framing. See also this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157

spprashant• 2 months ago

I agree. With Altman at least it seems he is making the pivot because he thinks its better messaging. Amodei is just re-framing what he actually sees as the endgame here. He says 10x productivity, he means 10x less jobs.

simonw7• 2 months ago

I would hope that if Sam was making a deliberate pivot here he might use a slightly bigger platform to do so than a conversation with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference.

aresant• 2 months ago

This is an absolutely classic PR "submarine" effort to reframe the impact of AI

Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

(1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...

(2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse" eg - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...

(3) There is a bright line between these articles and growing concern / pushback on the development of new data centers with both moratoriums and significant municipal cancellations.

(4) Perhaps more materially the architects of AI are being challenged directly - in April Sam Altman's home was (a) bombed and then (b) shot at and weeks later the entire industry was just taken to task by The Pope! himself calling for acknowledgement of human limitation, grace, and dignity.

(5) Meanwhile Sam and others are reframing including launching a new foundation to "increase quality of life and individual freedoms for people around the world" and pivoting messaging to AI "accelerating everyone in achieving their goals" https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431 & https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888

Is this because the architects don't believe AI will be as disruptive as planned or . . . ?

margalabargala• 2 months ago

It'll be disruptive, but not apocalyptic. Some classes of jobs common today will be eliminated, while more will grow. Overall productivity will increase, but it'll suck for the people made obsolete.

Certainly it will not result in most people working fewer hours.

Source: see the adoption of computers/databases across previously pen-and-paper industries 50 years ago. That was more disruptive than this will be.

watwut2• 2 months ago

The most maddening thing is that in our current timeline, the more obviously you lie and bullshit, the more you get rewarded. And winners can lie and bullshit with even less pushback, creating deadly cycle.

suzzer99• 2 months ago

This has been largely true for the history of tech. The most-hyped technology usually wins out over the best technology.

wcfrobert• 2 months ago

"Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese." - PG in 2005

Look how low we've stooped in 20 years... Online writing used to be wholly authentic. Now it's like finding a needle in an AI slop haystack.

a34729t• 2 months ago

Yeah, I feel like it has been decided that "AI apocalypse" talk has been deemed dangerous by the masters of the universe, and thusly the talk needs to be different. Dangerous meaning, of course, how bad things will get.

Animats• 2 months ago

Right, as noted above, last week The Economist finally said it's real. That's a reversal from their previous position. The Economist likes to look at actuals, which always trail real time, rather than projections. Now they can see it happening in past data.

AI deployment is going much faster than previous industrial revolutions, such as railroads and tractors and even computers. When these things take a generation, they get absorbed. When they take less time than a college education, there's a big jobs problem.

conception• 2 months ago

Climate change for the economy. With a similar lack of action before everything is terrible I’m sure.

zymhan• 2 months ago

There is no evidence yet in the labour-market data of AI destroying many jobs.

Literally from the article https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...

themafia• 2 months ago

Is what the architects believe informed by reality or by dreams of profit? Why even account for them if you can't define this?

karmickoala• 2 months ago

I think it's your (implied) second suggestion. It's interesting that someone here even predicted that AI companies would walk back such statements, I think it was in the Eric Schmidt booing thread.

DrScientist3• 2 months ago

This is an absolutely classic PR "submarine" effort to reframe the impact of AI

Indeed. Though the Graham article is out of date - he says bloggers have become the authentic voice ( in his own blog... ) - whereas you could argue now that the PR industry doesn't fear bloggers anymore - they have now weaponised them as 'influencers'.

AlexandrB• 2 months ago

So in the span of 2 years we've gone from "AI will be our new God and solve all of our problems" to "AI will replace all your jobs and make SaaS companies obsolete", to now "AI will have some impact on the job market - might be positive, might be negative - who can say?"

I'm filing this right next to "blockchain for everything" and "we will all live in the metaverse" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise (if they even understand that). I can't believe the level of credulous hype around this stuff. At least AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".

2dfds• 2 months ago

" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise "

Its interesting isnt it? That many humans dont seem to understand that unless you know a thing well, perhaps you should shut up and not comment.

How can Dario and Sam credibly say we are going to automate X, Y, Z job when they've never done it in their lives? Its like the idiots on here talking down on accountants - unless you've done the job and prove you understand the mechanics: shush. Dont talk about stuff you have zero clue about. I see this time and time again in posts related to finance - just shut up and stop creating noise.

mustaphah• 2 months ago

Sam Altman and other big figures tend to shape their narratives around their personal and organizational interests. When people were skeptical, they pushed hard into the "God-like AI" narrative. Now that safety concerns are growing and their growth plans are in danger, they're pushing back against what they used to advocate.

Even if they genuinely believe what they’re saying, their perspective is still fundamentally biased and should always be taken with a healthy grain of salt.

customguy• 2 months ago

I think they just say shit. And then they say the exact opposite shit, without blinking. Maybe that's why they confuse next token prediction with thought, not to ennoble "AI", but to absolve themselves.

_23sd• 2 months ago

Implicit in a lot of "AI jobs apocalypse" predictions is the assumption that most tasks are ridiculously easy compared to AI research, so naturally the smart AI researchers can understand any profession well enough to credibly predict that AI will be able to replace it. I'm personally not sure the apocalypse has been truly disproven as opposed to progress just being slower than some of the overexuberant predictions, but there does seem to be a pattern of famous AI researchers predicting a job would be automated and turning out to be wrong because they focused too hard on a single aspect of it that could be automated while handwaving or ignoring the hard parts. This has prominently happened with radiology, then with customer service, and now they are walking back on programming too. Maybe take these guys with a grain of salt going forward? I trust them to be able to tell us frontier AI models will keep getting better, not to predict the impact that will have on specific industries. Some people will insist we should give them half credit for predicting there would be impact at all (as opposed to the "it's a bubble" refrain) but I think it should be possible to ignore two categories of obviously dumb predictions at the same time.

zozbot234• 2 months ago

Programming has been successfully automated though. Programmers used to write programs line-by-line in raw binary code or assembly mnemonics, now they just write high-level formal code in languages like C++ or Rust and the computer spends much of its working time processing those lexer and parser 'tokens' and translating the whole thing into assembly and binary code. It all works quite well.

gyomu• 2 months ago

Before:

- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements

- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability

- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code

- programmers write binary/assembler code

Now:

- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements

- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability

- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code

- programmers write C++/Rust code

Pray tell, where do you see the “programming has been successfully automated” part?

rdedev• 2 months ago

There is a wide chasm between writing code in python vs "write a star craft clone". And that is not where near writing python vs writing binary code.

To put in another way, we have been building abstractions to make things easier for us to code. With coding agents you don't even code in the first place. It almost feels like a logical fallacy to compare the two

smoe• 2 months ago

I think we too often treat other people’s jobs like spherical cows out of ignorance. Not just AI researchers.

Long before LLMs, programmers regularly and massively underestimated how hard it is to automate other people’s work. Knowledge workers often think carpenters just bang nails into wood, while blue collar workers think knowledge work as sitting in front of a screen copying values from Excel on the left into a form on the right while sipping a latte.

Only like 2.5 years ago, I thought programming would be one of the last knowledge worker jobs to be significantly affected by LLMs, not one of the first. I think AI models will continue to be very impactful. But for quite a while, they may mostly turn knowledge work into a last mile problem rather than eliminating it.

gxs2• 2 months ago

One of the things missed with AI is that it’s enabled people to do more - either by augmenting skill sets or augmenting bandwidth

In my own circles this has led to more work not less

Expectations are higher, SLAs are tighter. Which makes sense - if a company can mine more gold with less works, they aren’t going to retire workers they will ask for even more gold

Managers are coding again, analysts are expected to write better requirements and do more of their own analytics, lots of worn all around

Eventually we will saturate that and need new people again

I don’t disagree with the general principle that people will lose jobs, I just a) don’t think it will be as accelerated as people claim and b) more obviously the disruption will be felt in roles that are more rote and mechanical in nature - e.g. peoples whose job is in the family of summarizing data or compiling metrics, generating simple content (slide decks), etc and slowly creep up from there

AI is one of those garbage in garbage out things and so far the quality out when the input quality has been great from what I’ve seen. Just a note preemptively to the nay sayers

watwut2• 2 months ago

It does not make sense. If you have tool that makes you more productive and somehow end up overworked, it is not because of the tool. It is deliberate decision of the management. More productivity could mean more earning for the company. It could mean people getting kind of bored as work dries out.

What you describe is normal push beyond possible with predictable longer term results.

gxs2• 2 months ago

Yeah I purposely didn’t get into the right or not - it’s just how I’m seeing things evolve in “real time”

A big part of it is that people feel like they are drinking from a firehouse having to learn to use ai (which is not always just a prompt) and having to leverage it effectively at the same time for real product/business work

I suspect this will settle down at some point too

One other observation I’ve seen: the makeup of a team that can leverage ai is turning out to be different than the make up of the usual high performing Eng team we think about

atleastoptimal• 2 months ago

Are they walking back their PR or their actual beliefs?

I think they realize that even if AI takes all jobs, the process to getting there will be less turbulent if they obfuscate and minimize it, until the working class no longer has leverage, rather than sounding the alarm earlier, leading to a more concerted populist uprising, and then AI is regulated far more than they want

overfeed2• 2 months ago

They are walking back old PR with updated PR

Sol-• 2 months ago

Kind of a let down if that were to mean that they are bearish on super intelligence.

MagicMoonlight• 2 months ago

AI lets me be far more productive, creating far more demand. Before I wouldn’t have made half the stuff I’ve made, because it was too time consuming. The lowered opportunity cost has led to me having more to do.

It doesn’t have this effect for morons. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily slop out some garbage, but you won’t be able to iterate on it or maintain it. These models will produce some really stupid outputs unless you actively fight them. Then if you try and add something new, you’re slapping new layers of slop onto the stinking pile.

I’m not concerned about losing my job with these current slop models. Most employees can barely read and write, they aren’t suddenly going to produce entire systems just because they can slop stuff out.

fletchowns• 2 months ago

then began responding to come again manually

Presumably they meant to write "to some again manually". On the one hand I'm kind of surprised when typos make it into major publications these days. Now, it's kind of a reassuring sign that an article was written and reviewed by humans though.

yalogin• 2 months ago

They are walking it back because they realized they don’t have anything to gain by it at this point. Previously they could get market attention and employer attention to increase their revenue and now that part is done. Their pipelines are full and the employer mindshare is obtained. They can pivot back is what they figured out

guluarte• 2 months ago

I don't know if anyone else feels the same but for me, the more productive LLMs become, the more work I have.

i7l• 2 months ago

That's why executives are pushing for LLMs everywhere in businesses: to ensure the floor goes up for everyone. A few productive stars who don't alter the expectations baseline for everyone. That way, all need to work harder, so the execs get to pocket the benefits.

Whether AI actually makes people more productive is irrelevant: you just declare that people need to do more for the same amount of money and in the same amount of time, and employees have to scramble. Just dangle that carrot a little further out so the donkeys work harder.

uejfiweun4• 2 months ago

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we've replaced "deep work" with constant context switching, breakages, and friction. I got into this line of work in order to go deep and build cool stuff, but now the vast majority of my day-to-day is spent fighting against interfaces. Couple this with unreasonable expectations from the man and yeah, my dev job is leaving me more exhausted than ever.

mschuster91• 2 months ago

How about both of them are walked into a prison and we throw the keys away?

The amount of suffering these two people (and of course also their fellowship) have caused is absurd and as a society, we should not just let this be swept under the rug. Arrest Sam Altman.

ViktorRay• 2 months ago

The Industrial Revolution led to a substantial decrease in agricultural jobs for humanity. But ultimately there were new jobs created.

This happens with every technological innovation. It’s called creative destruction. The idea that some technology will lead to mass unemployment and then some kind of revolution…that is a myth that’s been around since Marx. Actually even before him.

I predict the same thing will happen. Some jobs will go away. Others will take their place. The people of the 1700’s and 1800’s couldn’t have even begun to imagine the kinds of jobs many do today.

jplusequalt• 2 months ago

I predict the same thing will happen. Some jobs will go away. Others will take their place. The people of the 1700’s and 1800’s couldn’t have even begun to imagine the kinds of jobs many do today.

What are these jobs? I have seen this same opinion by so many, but nobody can hazard a guess what those jobs are. In the meantime, those whosw careers are caught in the blast radius of AI are putting their hope on hypothetical jobs appearing before their employers decide to replace them.

Golly, no wonder people aren't happy!

uejfiweun4• 2 months ago

Unfortunately, we don't experience creative destruction in abstract terms like reading about it in a history textbook. Most people are really just focused on their own lives. Losing their job AND the economic value of their skills is nothing short of a disaster. I don't think telling them "relax, eventually you'll be able to switch over to entirely new categories of employment!" is really going to strike the chord you're looking for.

throwburn202605• 2 months ago

Many jobs today require 3-6 years of training, either degree, deploma, or apprenticeship. There currently isn't the economic incentives in place vs ditching the old guard and hiring new.

Previous positions need to go through the process again merely to arrive at the bottom of thebl ladder

keybored• 2 months ago

Architects of misfortune telling your their maximalist ambitions isn’t bad. It’s a blessing. Now never forget their vile fantasies, even if they shy away from them and talk about giving everyone a little bit of UBI and other such HORSESHIT.

shoopadoop• 2 months ago

Musk wants all the money, but at the same time he also says that money is passe and that you don't need to worry about retirement in the upcoming era of Amazing Abundance(TM)

plaidfuji• 2 months ago

Altman’s realization was born partially out of an experiment of his own. He tried delegating his Slack and email responses to AI, then began responding to some again manually.

Well I’ll be..

BrenBarn• 2 months ago

Does anyone actually believe that anything these people say has any relationship to reality? As far as I can tell it's 90% just saying whatever they think will make them the most money, with maybe 10% of self-delusion thrown in because their brains are addled by spending all their time in a bubble world where AI is the be-all and the end-all. Maybe AI will cause a jobs apocalypse, maybe it won't, but I sure as hell wouldn't trust anything Sam Altman says on the matter.

penguin_booze• 2 months ago

The betrayal was more closer to home than CEOs nutting themselves out. Your employer got enamoured with AI. And despite knowing you (or not) what you're capable of, they started shoving AI down your throat. Your job title has effectively been changed to 'AI operator'. White collar jobs, if not fully eliminated, have surely been transformed. White collar workers, who were once pets, have now been turned into cattle.

zombiefromfo• 2 months ago

Too little, too late. I hope they both go yo jail over all that they have done

DrScientist3• 2 months ago

I think the only certainty here is what Sam Altman chooses to say in public is very much in Sam Altman's interests.

So working back from that:

- The IPO is the way to convert theoretical riches into real riches. Indeed if OpenAI business model never actually works out it may be the only significant chance.

- They want a large retail investor ( driven by hype and not numbers ) component to the IPO to maximise gain.

- They fear that the open public hostility to AI and AI companies put's this at risk.

- Hence the about face on the messaging. THe first messaging about job reductions was about the value OpenAI could capture - that was aimed at initial investors. Now they want to take money from the general public - so a different message.

DrScientist3• 2 months ago

I asked OpenAI for comment on the above ( via ChatGPT of course ).

The two things it added is that being seen as too disruptive/unpopular creates regulatory risk which could impact future growth and profits, and also secondary reputation risk for investors both which might impact the IPO.

classified• 2 months ago

"Sorry, we lied to you to make more money. Now that we got it, we want you to like us again."

tripleee• 2 months ago

nothing these people say has any relation to reality. It's all marketing

66yatman• 2 months ago

Are there grounds for we to get sue? Please let me know.

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

Related Stories