While Altman said that OpenAI and other tech giants were “roughly right” about the direction AI would take, he added that he was “pretty wrong” about the impact it would have socially and on the job market, which were first mentioned by the AI giant when ChatGPT launched in 2022.

In July last year, Altman said that AI was already sophisticated and that it would likely cause entire job categories to disappear, in what seemed like an admission that the technology is unlikely to be beneficial to the many, but great at cutting costs for the few.

“Some areas, again, I think (will be) just like totally, totally gone,” he said, referring to customer support roles while speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C.

“That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine … Now you call one of those things and AI answers.

“It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers.

“It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens. It’s done.”

Despite Altman’s latest comments, companies around the world, CBA included, have announced major job cuts as a result of AI implementation.

However, Altman attributes his change in tone to the “human part” of jobs, stating that despite AI’s ability to take on tasks, human interaction is valued by people, and it’s not something AI can automate.

Altman used the example of AI being utilised to respond to Slack messages and emails, something he did himself before deciding to return to responding to some of them himself.

“We really do care about our interactions with people, and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon,” he said.

“It really, in both positive and negative ways, updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different [from what] we thought,” he added based on his own experience.

Altman also rewound comments regarding the sophistication of AI models, maintaining that while they are advanced, adoption rates and economic environments show that the technology is in its early stages.

“We have these incredibly smart models, [but] I think one has to look at the state of the economic adoption and say we’re still very early,” he said, adding that much needs to be done for AI to be integrated fully into society responsibly, and for businesses to then start truly benefiting from it.