OpenAI’s Sam Altman said yesterday that AI is unlikely to lead to a “jobs apocalypse”.

He said he and his executives had been “roughly right” on the technological ​predictions made by OpenAI when it launched ChatGPT in 2022. But he said they were “pretty wrong” on the social and economic implications.

“I’m delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” Altman told CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn in an interview.

He didn’t comment on why this is.  He mused that some “human interaction” is still needed for lots of roles.

But what’s unsaid is what’s more important here.

If AI’s creators were truly capable of everything they claimed AI could do, then there would be an AI apocalypse.  After all, Anthropic’s CEO stated that we were 18-24 months away from a “datacenter full of geniuses”.  You’d think that by now, we’d at least have a datacenter full of entry level staffers, ready to replace a wide variety of jobs.

But this isn’t the case.  It turns out that these tools truly are generative AI.  Just generative AI.

If you want to generate some art, get some code advice, or write your high school English essay, AI is fantastic.  But if you want it to handle customer interactions according to your company policy the same way every time, or manage a warehouse full of inventory, or balance the quarterly books…AI can’t do it.

You think maybe the layoffs in big tech are more about paying for all the massive buildouts in AI hardware rather than AI actually being able to do what the people being laid off were doing?

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

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