{"id":704105,"date":"2026-05-30T10:36:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T10:36:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/704105\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T10:36:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T10:36:37","slug":"openai-boss-downplays-jobs-apocalypse-as-threats-of-violence-hit-aussie-tech-giant-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/704105\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI boss downplays jobs apocalypse as \u2018threats of violence\u2019 hit Aussie tech giant"},"content":{"rendered":"

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OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman downplayed the threat of AI killing jobs just days after WiseTech informed the police of \u201cthreats of violence\u201d against its CEO, who is using the technology to replace thousands of its workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought,\u201d Altman told Commonwealth Bank boss Matt Comyn in a virtual appearance at an AI event in Sydney hosted by the bank.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate, or talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"OpenAIOpenAI CEO Sam Altman (virtual) with CommBank CEO Matt Comyn.Dominic Lorrimer<\/p>\n

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang was the first prominent AI executive who derided talk of a jobs apocalypse and the \u201cGod complex\u201d AI executives who have pushed these predictions.<\/p>\n

The scare hit fever pitch last year when Anthropic boss Dario Amodei bluntly warned<\/a> that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and cause unemployment to spike to as much as 20 per cent in the next one to five years. Altman has made similar comments in the past, suggesting entire job categories such as customer support roles could vanish.<\/p>\n

However, on Tuesday the OpenAI boss was \u201cdelighted to be wrong\u201d about the impact on entry-level white-collar work jobs, but said it was better to be open with the public and occasionally get things wrong.<\/p>\n

\u2018I don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate, or talk about.\u2019<\/p>\n

OpenAI boss Sam Altman<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s always important to point out: We don\u2019t really know, and many of the next jobs will be difficult to predict, and many things won\u2019t go the way that we think,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I think we really owe it to people to give them the best sense \u2026 of where we see the technology (is) likely to go at this moment and explain to people we may be wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

He acknowledged the difficulty in predicting what new jobs will be created as workers and businesses adopt AI, but hinted that, as AI takes over more processing tasks, high-level human supervision could be a \u201csignificant part\u201d of what most people do in the future.<\/p>\n

Altman\u2019s mea culpa comes as WiseTech starts sacking one-third of its workforce, as announced in February<\/a>, when new chief executive Zubin Appoo declared that the era of manually writing code as a core job activity is over.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re halving the human capacity, but we\u2019re significantly increasing the overall capacity through agentic AI,\u201d he said, referring to AI that not just reacts to prompts, but acts on its own.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"Thousands<\/a><\/p>\n

As reported in the Australian Financial Review<\/a>, WiseTech had to report \u201cthreats of violence\u201d against Appoo to police this week, while increasing security at its Sydney headquarters as the internal turmoil over the job losses led to violent threats.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese measures were implemented because of the serious nature of the threat, and further escalation over the weekend,\u201d WiseTech\u2019s executive chairman Richard White said in a note to staff on Sunday.<\/p>\n

White acknowledged the \u201creal concerns\u201d many employees had about their roles, their teams and the future.<\/p>\n

Comyn, who has been an aggressive adopter of AI in Australia\u2019s biggest bank, acknowledged these issues in an opinion column<\/a> in the AFR on Tuesday before the bank\u2019s AI conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI will have workforce consequences throughout the economy, and they should be faced directly. No one knows exactly how work will change over the next three years, let alone the next decade,\u201d he warned.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn employer of our scale has a responsibility to avoid false reassurance and give people the best possible chance to adapt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Commbank is treading more carefully after having to reverse a decision last year to sack call centre staff who were meant to be replaced by AI.<\/p>\n

But when it came to AI\u2019s threat to current workers, Altman issued what may have been a warning at the conference.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"anthropic\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He noted that despite the AI advances, and corporate adoption of AI tools, the technology has yet to deliver an equivalent economic return.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe question is, where is the revenue? Where are the actual productivity gains?\u201d Altman admitted.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd my best answer to that is, it\u2019s all still very new, and it\u2019s just going to take a little bit longer to figure out how a company actually does run more efficiently, and to make these great new products.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if a year from now we\u2019re still talking about that same question, I\u2019d be more concerned,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This goes back to the warning from many in the industry, Anthropic\u2019s Amodei among them, that the only way to recoup the massive investments on AI is through job losses.<\/p>\n

The Market Recap newsletter is a wrap of the day\u2019s trading. Get it each weekday afternoon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"ColinColin Kruger<\/a> is a senior business reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-704105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=704105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=704105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=704105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=704105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}