Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

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 not 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 help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them."

It's also amazing how hidden some of these realities before. Like, you assign a ticket to a developer, in the past they just wanted to know the develop 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.

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.

They won't be trillionaires with that attitude. They could have kept saying the line "Ai will replace all the jobs by the end of the year" for another 20 years.

This is an absolutely classic PR "submarine" effort to reframe the impact of AI

Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

(1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...

(2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse" eg - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...

(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.

(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.

(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" https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431 & https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888

Is this because the architects don't believe AI will be as disruptive as planned or . . . ?

It is kinda funny the irony of going from "we are going to replace devs" to "we <3 devs, keep burning those tokens"

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, and they were also wrong in their predictions, and now want to be rewarded for both with more money.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Will one of these companies be the first to hit 10 trillion valuation?

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.

OK, this is weird. The article says:

> 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.

But the link to the interview goes to this 2m11s YouTube video, and he doesn't use say anything of the sort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg

Here's a full MacWhisper transcript (easier to search than the YouTube one): https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027...

UPDATE: It turns out the article was linking to a short highlights video, but the interview itself was 45 minutes long.

I don't think the full video is available anywhere, so it's hard to confirm that "pretty wrong" quote.

This Reuters story carries the same quotes and, unlike the linked Fortune article, doesn't sit behind a paywall: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...

Fortune articles are behind a paywall, which makes them a bad fit for Hacker News.

This Reuters story carries a similar idea: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...

I'd warn that this all looks pretty thin - 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157

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?"

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 least AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".

Public sentiment has turned strongly 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.

This feels orchestrated (someone made a phone call to them). Look at this a16z tweet : https://x.com/a16z/status/2059687657840713925?s=20

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.

Guess they have found their market and this is it.

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.

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.

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.

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