OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns that artificial intelligence could destroy entire job categories, saying it could replace support workers because it «makes no mistakes.»
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns that artificial intelligence could destroy entire job categories, saying it could replace support workers because it «makes no mistakes.»
During his recent trip to Washington, Altman told Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman that «certain areas» of the job market «will simply disappear completely» as they are replaced by artificial intelligence agents, Futurism reports.
«When you call customer service, you get an AI, and that’s okay. He’s like an extremely intelligent, capable human being… He can do anything that any customer service agent at this company can do», — said Sam Altman.
According to him, AI «doesn’t make mistakes» and «is very fast.» How close OpenAI’s technology actually is to replacing entire industries remains questionable.
Insiders believe that the GPT-5 model, which OpenAI has been talking about since 2023, could be released as early as this August. Altman describes GPT-5 as an important step towards creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) that should match or even surpass human intelligence. The new model should also combine the capabilities of previous disparate models, such as «reasoning» models, under one «roof».
However, it is doubtful that even after the release of GPT-5, AI technology will be advanced enough to reliably replace human labor with a worthy alternative.
Already, some companies are admitting they are moving away from their promises to eliminate human labor. For example, the CEO of Klarna, who claimed that an AI assistant would do the work of 700 people, eventually changed his mind.
Last year, a study found that most customers don’t want companies to use artificial intelligence to serve customers.
There have been a few recent stories of AI letting its users down and showing the «rawness» of the technology. Previously, an AI agent for Gemini CLI programming failed to handle a request to organize files and deleted them. This is the second notable case of a flawed vibecoding tool leading to user data loss, and Gemini has at least admitted its mistake.
So Sam Altman is talking about a future that doesn’t exist yet and may never come. But as the head of one of the most successful companies in the field of artificial intelligence, he would certainly like to see his predictions come true.
