Sam Altman Says Some Jobs Will Vanish Completely Due to AI Progress

• Altman predicts entire job categories, like customer service, will vanish entirely as AI outperforms humans.
• He asserts AI diagnostics surpass doctors', yet maintains humans remain essential for medical oversight and empathy.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently spoke at a Federal Reserve conference in Washington, providing a blunt assessment of how artificial intelligence could reshape the workplace. According to The Guardian, Altman believes that certain jobs, particularly those in customer service, may disappear entirely. While the impact of AI on jobs has long been debated, hearing it directly from one of the field's leading voices feels significant, and, of course, a little concerning going forward.

Altman was blunt about the fate of customer service positions. He described AI-powered systems as being intelligent enough to handle everything from simple questions to complex problems, all without the need for human intervention. "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," he added. His point was that AI is now fast, accurate, and capable of performing the same tasks as human agents, albeit without the delays and errors.

Altman also discussed AI's growing role in healthcare, noting that tools like ChatGPT can often provide more accurate diagnoses than many doctors. Still, he admitted that he would not want to entrust his health entirely to a machine without human supervision. "I would not want to rely on that without a human in the loop for my own healthcare," according to him. And, honestly, it's a valid point: while AI can process massive amounts of medical data quickly, most people still value the reassurance and judgment of a human doctor.

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Altman's comments come as OpenAI increases its presence in Washington. The company intends to open an office there, and this visit represents a shift in tone from its previous push for strict AI regulation. The Trump administration's new "AI action plan" appears to prioritize speeding up development and infrastructure over slowing things down.

However, the founder of OpenAI did not ignore the risks. He expressed concern about how AI could be used maliciously, including the possibility of voice cloning being used for fraud. "The thing that keeps me up at night the most is the potential for cyberattacks on financial systems from rogue nation states using AI," according to him. It serves as a reminder that, while AI has great potential, it also poses significant challenges that we are only now beginning to understand.