Sam Altman tells Sydney audience the AI ‘jobs apocalypse’ he predicted probably won’t happen. What changed?
https://time.com/article/2026/05/26/sam-altman-ai-job-losses-openAI-/
Sam Altman tells Sydney audience the AI ‘jobs apocalypse’ he predicted probably won’t happen. What changed?
https://time.com/article/2026/05/26/sam-altman-ai-job-losses-openAI-/
45 Comments
He figured out it was an unpopular thing to say.
He read the room. (Or more likely his LLM did.)
What are they selling then? Dirtytalk bots? CSAM generator? What?
He’s just saying what the room wants to hear. He doesn’t give a shit or believe what he’s saying.
It’s all just to continue the grift and pull in more investment money.
AI doesnt work by itself. It still need code or a person using it. It helps a lot but also requirements will increase.
People firebombed and shot at his house, that’s what changed.
>What changed?
Someone tried to burn his house down.
He wants people to keep paying for his product.
It’s probably a couple things that made him say that. One, bad press. Two, it’s really a productivity boost for their target market and can’t headlessly take other peoples job. The models just aren’t there, and might never be at current comput prices. AI is useful, but needs babysitting and works best when you know the output you want to get in advance.
Hes a compulsive liar, no changes
He was targeted with violence. A grifter will change their tune real fast when staring down the barrel of their own mortality
The funniest part of this is that nothing about AI or the labour market has changed, just the audience he’s talking to. When he’s courting investors it’s “this will replace half of all jobs, better get in now or be disrupted,” and when he’s talking to a room full of workers and regulators it’s suddenly “actually it’ll mostly just help you write emails faster & better.” The business model still revolves around automating as much work as possible but the narrative just flips depending on whether fear or reassurance is more profitable in that moment. But whatever brings in the dollarydoos I guess
Sam’s always been playing both sides, nothing’s changed. If he’s suddenly saying AI won’t result in mass layoffs it’s only because the people he’s talking to don’t like the idea of the mass layoffs. Or they’re spooked by all the hate over his doomsaying so he’s trying to dial it back for the IPO.
The wind started blowing a different direction.
Seriously fuck these guys. So sick of this bullshit.
Investors are demanding ROI and AI is fucking expensive if the tech isn’t subsidized on others money
I still dont get the end game for these puppets, so you completely destroy the fabric that holds society together, which would be income tax, and then what dude?
Like fuckin then what?
Money is worthless without a functioning economy, how did any of you get to your positions without realising you have the give the slaves something so they dont eat you.
He was saying it when openAI was private to boost private investor confidence. Now as openAI is set to go public he wants to placate towards the retail and general audience as well.
What happened is that the messaging flopped *hard* and pissed off a ton of people.. one of which threw a *spicy cocktail* at his front door..
I don’t think these tech CEOs realized *just how unpopular* this shit really is.
Whether he believes it is anyone’s guess.. but I imagine dude doesn’t really “believe” in much of anything, and is just saying whatever his PR team has determined will make him the most money.
His technology sucks, but more than that, it’s a wildly unpopular thing to say. But really, the technology is not good.
You think the guy trying to burn down his house had anything to do with it?
The bubble is about to finally burst?? Stop the madness!!!
Adults got in his ear
It’s turning out to be too expensive to be used for everything.
Man selling product realized advertising for product made customers hate his product.
It’s a trap. Don’t fall for it.
I still look at AI like the cotton gin, or the printer.
At first it looks like it’s going to downsize jobs, and then “we” realize we can increase production, which doesn’t decrease slavery
AI had an impact on software development and the AI overlords extrapolated that to every other white collar job. Even if you accept that AI can replace devs, it’s a false assumption it can do the same in every other field. Silicon Valley has certain narcissism where they make products for themselves, first and foremost, and also cant see past their own nose. AI in its current form can’t get incrementally better and end up replacing knowledge workers. It would need a different method of functioning to have an understanding and ability to discern contexts. Until then, it can’t be trusted and won’t be good enough. Stuffing more data won’t get it to stop hallucinating. It needs to work more like a brain than a calculator.
Nothing changed, he’ll still just say whatever he thinks sounds best and will make him the most money.
I will be so glad when I never have to see this Innsmouth fish creature’s face in my feed again.
He’s talking to a different audience. Wait a week or two, and you’ll see him say something else when talking to another audience.
Put him in a room full of CEOs and he’ll tell them they can lay off 75% of their workforce.
This is a marketing technique that does not work anymore on his audience.
The bubble is going to pop
LLMs have essentially reached (or near to) their peak in terms of performance for the current hardware at hand. Larger models will take decades to train, and there is only so much data to train on as well. The age of the neural net has definitely just begun, but the time of the LLM leading the charge is passing.
CEOs are going to have a hard time explaining why no one’s getting a bonus or raise when there was plenty of cash burned on a tool with limited use and marginal productivity gain.
Probably changes his mind after someone tries to burn his house down
He decided he didn’t want to be torn limb from limb
Hi, My name is Sam, I love to tell people what they want to hear, when they need to hear it, to get what I want, when I want it.
He raised the investment money he needed so making headlines with bold statements is no longer required of him.
It succeeded in raising him money, and now he has to pivot to getting people to not hate AI
He became keenly aware that the people benefiting and any datacenters being built are both only a $5000 drone away from ceasing to exist. He’d promise AI would blow everyone in the audience if he thought it would keep him from being brutally swept under the anti-ai wave.
The backlash is what changed, but this is still their plan.
What happened? They discovered it was incredibly bad PR.
Sammy realized that talking about his wet dreams in public makes him unpopular.
Realizing if he keeps saying it government’s will be forced to move against his products by citizens.