Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions
by ianrahman on 5/28/2026, 7:43:14 PM
Comments
by: tunesmith
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 <i>not</i> 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 <i>help</i>, they can't come up with the <i>idea</i>." "Sure they can, we can just ask them."<p>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.<p>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.
5/28/2026, 8:38:26 PM
by: aresant
This is an absolutely classic PR "submarine" effort to reframe the impact of AI<p>Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - <a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a><p>(1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...</a><p>(2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse" eg - <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-ai-jobs-apocalypse" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...</a><p>(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.<p>(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.<p>(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" <a href="https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431</a> & <a href="https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888</a><p>Is this because the architects don't believe AI will be as disruptive as planned or . . . ?
5/28/2026, 9:15:08 PM
by: resfirestar
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.
5/28/2026, 9:56:39 PM
by: blitzar
They won't be trillionaires with that attitude. They could have kept saying the line "Ai will replace all the jobs <i>by the end of the year</i>" for another 20 years.
5/28/2026, 8:15:06 PM
by: mustaphah
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.<p>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.
5/28/2026, 9:45:13 PM
by: papichulo2023
It is kinda funny the irony of going from "we are going to replace devs" to "we <3 devs, keep burning those tokens"
5/28/2026, 7:59:08 PM
by: 0xbadcafebee
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, <i>and</i> they were also wrong in their predictions, and now want to be rewarded for both with more money.
5/28/2026, 8:34:23 PM
by: atleastoptimal
Are they walking back their PR or their actual beliefs?<p>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
5/28/2026, 10:00:38 PM
by: CodeCompost
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.
5/28/2026, 8:15:46 PM
by: fletchowns
> then began responding to come again manually<p>Presumably they meant to write "to <i>some</i> 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.
5/28/2026, 10:16:45 PM
by: dbvn
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?
5/28/2026, 8:12:37 PM
by: halamadrid
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.<p>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.<p>Will one of these companies be the first to hit 10 trillion valuation?
5/28/2026, 8:39:12 PM
by: Sol-
Kind of a let down if that were to mean that they are bearish on super intelligence.
5/28/2026, 10:02:31 PM
by: guestbest
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.
5/28/2026, 8:58:48 PM
by: simonw
OK, this is weird. The article says:<p>> 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.<p>But the link to the interview goes to this 2m11s YouTube video, and he doesn't use say anything of the sort: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg</a><p>Here's a full MacWhisper transcript (easier to search than the YouTube one): <a href="https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027a3f" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027...</a><p>UPDATE: It turns out the article was linking to a short highlights video, but the interview itself was 45 minutes long.<p>I don't think the full video is available anywhere, so it's hard to confirm that "pretty wrong" quote.<p>This Reuters story carries the same quotes and, unlike the linked Fortune article, doesn't sit behind a paywall: <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-says-ai-unlikely-lead-jobs-apocalypse-2026-05-26/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...</a>
5/28/2026, 8:40:44 PM
by: simonw
Fortune articles are behind a paywall, which makes them a bad fit for Hacker News.<p>This Reuters story carries a similar idea: <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-says-ai-unlikely-lead-jobs-apocalypse-2026-05-26/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...</a><p>I'd warn that this all looks <i>pretty thin</i> - 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: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157</a>
5/28/2026, 9:02:42 PM
by: b0sk
This feels orchestrated (someone made a phone call to them). Look at this a16z tweet : <a href="https://x.com/a16z/status/2059687657840713925?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/a16z/status/2059687657840713925?s=20</a>
5/28/2026, 8:46:08 PM
by: gxs
One of the things missed with AI is that it’s enabled people to do more - either by augmenting skill sets or augmenting bandwidth<p>In my own circles this has led to more work not less<p>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<p>Managers are coding again, analysts are expected to write better requirements and do more of their own analytics, lots of worn all around<p>Eventually we will saturate that and need new people again<p>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<p>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
5/28/2026, 9:59:23 PM
by: AlexandrB
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?"<p>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 <i>least</i> AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".
5/28/2026, 9:16:49 PM
by: metalliqaz
Public sentiment has turned <i>strongly</i> 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.
5/28/2026, 8:55:14 PM
by: hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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.<p>Guess they have found their market and this is it.
5/28/2026, 8:34:19 PM
by: MagicMoonlight
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.<p>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.<p>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.
5/28/2026, 10:06:53 PM
by: Analemma_
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.
5/28/2026, 7:58:23 PM
by: okasaki
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.
5/28/2026, 8:15:55 PM
by: booleandilemma
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.
5/28/2026, 8:16:35 PM
by: basseq
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5/28/2026, 8:59:14 PM