Sam Altman has made one of the most impressive U-turns of the artificial intelligence era, telling an audience in Sydney that the technology he helped unleash on the world will not, after all, trigger the “job apocalypse” doomsayers, including, until recently, himself, have spent the past three years predicting.
Speaking at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference, OpenAI’s chief executive admitted that his predictions of how quickly ChatGPT would shut down staff were “very wrong”. It’s an unusually frank admission from a Silicon Valley founder who is more used to selling the future than apologizing for the one he predicted.
“I’m glad I was wrong about this,” Altman said. “I thought it would have a greater impact on the termination of white-collar jobs than what has happened.
For small and medium-sized British businesses, many of which have been struggling to bet the farm on AI tooling, or to take courage and continue to hire graduates, the comments will come somewhere between confirmation and irritation, depending on how much money they have already transferred to the technology on the strength of previous warnings.
The human factor Altman says is not underestimated
Altman’s description of his change of heart is, on the face of it, refreshingly ordinary. The CEO also recounted trying to use AI to manage his own Slack messages, but found the work served as “an amazing example to me of how we really care about people”. The collaboration he values most, he said, “isn’t something I can imagine myself working on for AI anytime soon”.
It’s a far cry from his earlier suggestion that all job categories, especially customer support roles, would be removed from the economy. The pivot corresponds to the paradoxical economists of the 19th century who had pointed to it: the more productive machines are, the more valuable human qualities, judgment, empathy, accountability, seem to increase. As Business Matters previously reported, a large body of experts has been arguing that AI is the brainchild of the skilled workforce rather than the world-destroyer it has been portrayed as in some areas.
Not everyone in silicon valley has a memo
The problem with Altman is that his peers don’t seem to have his new hope. Dario Amodei, chief executive of rival lab Anthropic, warned only last year that AI could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10 to 20 percent within five years, a prediction he made in a widely-discussed interview with Fortune that has aged unfavorably on those downsizing announcements.
The list of household names that determine the census and AI as a reason has expanded significantly in recent weeks. Standard Chartered has confirmed plans to eliminate around 7,800 positions, about 15 percent of the workforce affected, by the end of the decade, with chief executive Bill Winters describing the cuts as replacing “low-level human capital” with technology. The word caused such a backlash that Winters was forced to send a clarifying memo to staff within days.
Meta, meanwhile, has begun further layoffs, shedding 8,000 roles, nearly a tenth of its workforce, while Amazon, Microsoft and Jack Dorsey’s Block have all announced major cuts this year. According to industry tracker Layoffs.fyi, more than 140 tech companies have collectively let go of more than 111,000 workers since January.
The UK picture: degree schemes are feeling the pinch
For the SME owner-managers who form the core of the Business Matters study, a more telling indicator is what happens at the entry-level end of the talent pipeline in the UK itself. Vacancies for graduates, particularly in professional services, have softened significantly, and entry-level job postings have fallen by almost a third since the launch of ChatGPT, as retail, IT and finance have struggled. The big four accounting firms have reduced the number of graduates as fewer jobs are taken over by automation.
Whether that entails an apocalypse or a plot reset is a matter of words. What’s hard to argue with is that the bottom rung of the corporate ladder is shorter than it was three years ago, and one in six UK employers now expect further AI-related redundancies within the next twelve months, according to the latest industry survey.
What Goldman’s numbers actually mean
The most reliable view of the labor market remains, as always, with the bean counters of Goldman Sachs. The bank’s economists estimate that AI reduced US monthly wage growth by about 16,000 jobs last year, and lowered the unemployment rate by about 0.1 percent. The most exposed roles, telephone operators, insurance claims clerks, financial managers, saw a limited contraction in the workforce. On the other hand, jobs where AI augments rather than replaces human effort added about 9,000 positions over the same period.
All in all, these are not apocalypse numbers. They’re numbers for slow, steady rocking, the kind of hard-hitting structural change that’s unprepared and rewards those who practice early.
What does this mean for British SMEs
To the owner of a 50-person accountancy practice in Manchester or a marketing agency in Bristol, Altman’s volte-face is less an injunction to ease than an invitation to think clearly. The return thesis with AI is clearly occurring in large employers, process survivors, banks, the Big Four, hyperscale technology firms. It occurs much less, and more selectively, in small and medium-sized enterprises which employ around three-fifths of the workforce in the UK’s private sector.
The lesson, if there is one, is that the question is no longer whether AI is replacing humans. Where are the people, what jobs are they doing, where are the businesses. Altman, meanwhile, thinks his earlier predictions were wrong. SME leaders looking at their hiring pipelines, layoff budgets and graduate programs would be wise to draw their own conclusions, and take action before the next U-turn.
