He has said that AI will “probably replace most of the jobs people do today,” that entire job categories will be “totally, totally gone,” and that those impacted by the dramatic shifts will “find all sorts of new things to do".
Read More: The Real Economics of AI and Jobs
“I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened," Altman said.
Altman went on to explain that the “human part” of employment could not be replaced by AI, and that people care about interacting with each other at work.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TIME.
What changed Sam Altman's mind?
OpenAI aims to reach $280 billion in revenue by 2030, up from $25 billion today. SpaceX is hoping for a $1.5 trillion valuation in its initial public offering (IPO). And Anthropic is reportedly in talks to secure $30 billion in funding with a valuation of a $900 billion, according to the Financial Times.
Uber's President and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Macdonald, also said in a recent podcast interview posted May 22 that it is becoming harder and harder to justify AI costs in the company. The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, went viral in April for admitting Uber burned through its 2026 Claude Code budget in four months.
“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” he told Axios.
Economists differ widely in their beliefs about whether AI will actually lead to a “job apocalypse,” largely because adoption is happening more slowly than technological advancement. A recent Brookings report found that “rapid advances in AI capability are not translating automatically into broad economic gains or meaningful adoption.”
The Yale Budget Lab, which has also been tracking AI’s effect on the labor market, found in a May study that AI was likely not the reason for a weakening in the labor market, and that there has not yet been a meaningful change in unemployment through March 2026 for workers in jobs with high AI exposure.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said last year that up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs will dissolve within the next five years, and unemployment could skyrocket to 10-20%.
At the TIME100 Summit last month, business leaders and CEOs argued that AI will revolutionize entry-level jobs. Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel said that the “lowest rung on the ladder has been pulled away by AI” when discussing how customer service work in his company is now being done by AI.
Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 roles in May— about 10% of its workforce — and scrapped thousands more positions it had posted, citing a shift to AI as the justification. Financial software company Intuit cut 17% of its staff, or 3,000 people, this month. Amazon and Alphabet announced rounds of layoffs as they made a push for greater AI adoption and efficiency.
“Technology companies continue to announce large-scale cuts and are leading all industries in layoff announcements. They are also often citing AI spend and innovation. Regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is,” said Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
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