ChatGPT Seen as Pioneer of Layoff Wave, OpenAI Boss's Sweet Promise

Since the explosive rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), pioneered by the arrival of ChatGPT, waves of layoffs have begun to emerge across various industrial sectors, with the numbers now becoming increasingly massive.

Amid public concerns about the threat of AI to jobs, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has finally spoken out and made a firm promise.

Through a post on the X platform (formerly Twitter), the man steering the success of ChatGPT pledged that his company has no intention of sidelining human roles.

“We want to build tools that empower and enhance human capabilities, not create entities that replace humans,” Altman wrote on X in early May.

Altman’s statement comes amid a challenging situation in the technology industry. Over the past year, the United States has been hit by a brutal wave of layoffs.

One of the most spotlighted cases is the unfortunate fate of engineers at King, the studio behind the mobile game Candy Crush.

The engineers at the company were tasked with designing an AI-based game level generator tool.

Tragically, once the automatic level creator tool project was completed, those technicians were immediately sacked, and their work was entirely replaced by the AI system they had created themselves.

This anxiety has been further exacerbated and amplified by comments from other AI company executives, one of whom is Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.

Amodei is known to have repeatedly made claims that are quite unsettling for tech workers.

He predicts that humanity is now only about six months to a year away from an era where “all computer code is written entirely by AI”.

According to the OpenAI boss, the mass pessimism regarding the loss of livelihoods is seen as a mistaken view when viewed from a long-term perspective.