‘It's coming': OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says humanoid robots may disrupt jobs soon

Indian Express

12 hours ago

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI is bound to change a lot of jobs, meaning that it will take some jobs away but also 'create a bunch of new ones.'
'If you look at the history of the world, technological-driven job change, when one class of jobs goes away and another one pops up, that's very consistent, it's punctuated. But that's just been happening for a long time. And the thing that is different this time is just the rate with which it looks like it will happen,' Altman said.
He made these remarks in an appearance on 'The Circuit with Emily Chang', a programme on Bloomberg Originals, where the pair discussed the unprecedented demand for AI compute and the conceptualisation of the $500 billion-dollar Stargate project.
Beyond the wide-ranging impact of AI on jobs, Altman also warned about breakthroughs in humanoid robot development. 'I don't think the world has really had the humanoid robots moment yet, and I don't think that's very far away […] What happens when the humanoid robots get here? I mean, obviously do a lot of jobs,' he said.
Altman also highlighted the acceleration of scientific research and discovery as one of the most exciting possibilities he sees with AI. 'I think 2025 will be a world where we have agents do a lot of work, things we already know how to do. I'm hopeful that 2026 will be a big year of new scientific progress,' he said.
The AI industry leader was also careful not to give the impression that he knows exactly what the future holds. 'Do I think I could have sat here in 1905 and told you what we were about to discover in physics, and that 40 years later we would, like, have an atomic bomb? Definitely not,' he told Bloomberg's Emily Chang.
Here are a few other highlights from the nearly 20 minute-long interview.
At the beginning of the year, US President Donald Trump announced what might be the most ambitious infrastructure project in the country's history since NASA's first missions to the moon. This initiative known as the Stargate Project is actually a joint venture among OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Arm, Oracle, Softbank, and other corporate partners aiming to invest $500 billion to build out AI infrastructure such as data centers, energy plants, power lines, and more in the US over the next four years.
The first data centre under the project is already under construction in Texas and will be dedicated to training OpenAI's next AI models. In the Bloomberg interview, Altman revealed 'Stargate' started out as an internal codename based on the early layouts of the data centres.
He described the project as 'a complex supply chain with a lot of partners and obviously a lot of capital.' 'We used to think a lot about the compute we would need to train the models. And what we didn't used to think about was how much people were going to use these models. It just turned out people want to use the models much more than we imagined,' he said while talking about how the $500 billion infrastructure project was conceptualised.
When asked about the need for more compute and infrastructure, Altman pointed to the surge in inference demand sparked by the recent trend of AI-generated Ghibli-style images. 'Making an image is not a low compute task. We had to do a lot of very unnatural things. We had to borrow compute capacity from research. We had to slow down some other features because it's not like we have hundreds of thousands of GPUs sitting around just spinning idly,' he said.
'But if we had more GPUs, we would be more able to handle demand surges like this and we wouldn't have to put such restrictions on other features,' Altman added.
When asked why OpenAI couldn't get the required compute from its biggest investor, Microsoft, Altman said, 'We do get a lot of great stuff from Microsoft but I think this is more than any one company can deliver. Microsoft will do a lot of compute for us. I'm very happy about that.'
In response to a question about DeepSeek's breakthrough in developing cost-efficient LLMs, Altman said, 'I think the DeepSeek team is very talented and did a lot of good things. I don't think they figured out something way more efficient than what we figured out.'
OpenAI has previously alleged that DeepSeek may have ripped off its technology to develop its AI models through a process called distillation. Altman further emphasised that the company continues to make strides in terms of efficiency. 'We will have better chips. We will have better energy sources. We'll have better algorithms. We will optimise,' he said.
On whether OpenAI could become a financially viable company, Altman said, 'We are definitely doing something unprecedented. But, it doesn't mean something can't go wrong.' He also acknowledged that the ChatGPT-maker would be in a difficult financial position if users stopped paying for AI services.
He identified access to the best infrastructure layer and best top of the stack as OpenAI's biggest advantages over its competitors.
On what Trump's re-election as US president means for the AI industry, Altman said that he was optimistic. 'I think he [Trump] will get to make some of the most important decisions anyone in the world has gotten to make related to AI […] One thing that's really impressed me about President Trump is his ability to understand the whole industry and all the changes so quickly.'