AI CEOs and tech leaders are trying to find the right way to talk about the labor market.
Increasingly, they are moving beyond the sweeping statements about a white-collar job wipeout that may have fueled the growing AI backlash.
"I'm delighted to be wrong about this," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a recent event hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. "I thought that there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar work jobs being eliminated by now than it's actually happened."
The OpenAI CEO said his views began to change when he briefly tried to let AI write emails and Slack messages for him, an experience he said was "dehumanizing" to watch.
"It's the human part of the roles, and it really in both positive and negative ways updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought," he said. "I don't think we're going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about."
Altman may be the most direct, but he's far from alone in trying to turn the page on warnings about significant white-collar unemployment.
"I think that people are scared because it's poorly defined and it's often framed as an inevitable, threatening gray cloud over people's heads," Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman recently told The Verge's "Decoder" podcast.
In February, Suleyman told the Financial Times, "White-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."
Suleyman told the "Decoder" that his quote was misunderstood and that he's not actually changing his view. He said he was talking about the tasks workers do, like reading emails, not the job of actually being a lawyer.
"Sending an email, having a conversation with a colleague, putting together a PowerPoint — sub-tasks will increasingly become digitized, automated, and we can basically generate more and more of them," he said. "That does not necessarily mean that the role goes away at all."
The shifting tone and clarifications come at a pivotal moment in AI. On Friday, SpaceX made its Nasdaq debut. OpenAI and Anthropic have both confirmed they are taking steps toward their own IPOs.
At the same time, political backlash is growing. Data centers are quickly becoming a hot-button issue.
In June, Seattle passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers. Overall, the industry is grappling with a stark reality that the technology they say is one of the biggest advancements in human history is massively unpopular in the US. A May Economist-YouGov poll found that 71% of Americans think the pace of AI development is moving too quickly.
Microsoft President Brad Smith called the recent booing of speakers who talked about AI at prominent college commencements "a powerful wake-up call for the tech sector."
In a lengthy blog post, Smith wrote that AI "will displace some jobs," but the compressed timeline for some predictions would be unlike that of similar technological breakthroughs.
"There are some who look at the power of AI and predict its massive diffusion in just a few years," Smith wrote. "It's always possible that this time will be different, but the world has never previously seen technology diffusion at that pace."
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has become the industry's leading voice on AI job displacement. Last year, he warned that AI could wipe out up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs over the next 1 to 5 years. Amodei said there's a reason he's sounded the alarm.
"I have warned about job displacement in interviews and essays because I want both policymakers and the private sector to have the best chance to adapt and respond, not because I am trying to be a 'prophet of doom,'" Amodei wrote in an essay published on Wednesday.
At the same time, Amodei said, "AI will enable a number of new economic opportunities."
"I've predicted that AI will enable single individuals to create billion-dollar companies, and we're already seeing teams of only a few people build businesses with hundreds of millions in revenue," he wrote.