Something big happened in the world of AI the other day: Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI, and probably the person who’s most commonly regarded as the face of the industry, declared that the purpose of AI is not to take people’s jobs:
And he recently called AI CEOs “tone-deaf” for declaring that AI is going to take people’s jobs:
In fact, this shift represents more evolution than revolution. Years ago, Altman did seem to generally agree with the folk consensus that AI’s purpose is to make most or all humans obsolete; in 2014 he warned that we could be faced with “a new idle class”, and explored the idea of Universal Basic Income as a remedy. In 2021 he wrote that “The price of many kinds of labor…will fall toward zero.”
But in recent years, Altman has consistently stated that although AI will destroy many occupations, it will create new tasks for humans to do. In 2024 he wrote that “I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today)”, and in 2025 he declared that “We will find new things to do, new ways to be useful to each other, and new ways to compete, but they may not look very much like the jobs of today.” He has reiterated that prediction in interviews.
OpenAI’s mission statement, meanwhile, continues to define the company’s goal as the creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which it defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. That “most” does leave some wiggle room. But perhaps more importantly, the company is talking about AGI less and less — its 2026 statement of principles mentions the term only twice, as compared with 12 times in the 2018 version. OpenAI also removed a clause about AGI in its agreement with Microsoft, meaning that the term no longer defines its contractual business obligations.
So although Altman has never been quite as doomer-ish as some of his colleagues when it comes to AI and jobs, you can definitely feel the winds shifting. In fact, there has always been a contingent of tech leaders who have been broadly optimistic about AI and jobs, and who are now speaking up more vociferously. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has consistently predicted that AI will create more jobs than it destroys, but recently he has harshly criticized AI CEOs who go around saying that their technology is a job-killer:
Venture capital titan Marc Andreessen, meanwhile, has come out swinging against the AI job loss narrative:
Cynical observers will see this all as just a messaging pivot, in response to the AI industry’s deteriorating popularity. Back in March I wrote about how the AI industry’s sales pitch was basically “Our product’s purpose is to put you and your descendants on welfare forever, and it may also wipe out your whole species”:
