Sam Altman says we're worried about the wrong part of the workforce when it comes to AI
Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said he's more worried about how older employees will adapt to AI changing the workplace than college graduates. His view contrasts with how many of his competitors and others in tech think about the next five years.
"I'm more worried about what it means not for the 22-year-old, but for the 62-year-old that doesn't want to go retrain or rescale or whatever the politicians call it that no one actually wants," Altman said recently on Cleo Abram's "Huge Conversations" YouTube show.
Altman said jobs will definitely go away because of AI, but young people are positioned to weather the changes better than others.
"If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history," Altman said.
Overall, he said, the breadth of what AI can do makes this a powerful moment for those willing to seize the opportunity.
"There's never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new, to go invent something, to start a company, whatever it is," Altman said. 'I think it is probably possible now to start a company that is a one-person company that will go on to be worth more than a billion dollars. And more importantly than that, deliver an amazing product and service to the world."
Fellow tech CEOs, including those in AI, don't share Altman's optimism. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said earlier this summer that AI could wipe out as much as half of entry-level white collar jobs in the next five years. It's a potential catastrophe that Amodei said the tech industry and policymakers are not doing enough to prepare society to handle.
Beyond five years, Altman said, it gets harder to predict what the world will look like due to the rapid changes his field is spurring.
"In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some kind of completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job, and feeling so bad for you and I that we had to do this kind of really boring old kind of work and everything is just better," he said.
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