[simonw]

OK, this is weird. The article says:

> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk.

But the link to the interview goes to this 2m11s YouTube video, and he doesn't use say anything of the sort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg

Here's a full MacWhisper transcript (easier to search than the YouTube one): https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027...

UPDATE: It turns out the article was linking to a short highlights video, but the interview itself was 45 minutes long.

I don't think the full video is available anywhere, so it's hard to confirm that "pretty wrong" quote.

This Reuters story carries the same quotes and, unlike the linked Fortune article, doesn't sit behind a paywall: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...

[foolswisdom]

There's a partial corresponding quote at https://www.commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2026/05/sam-al....

[simonw]

That's a better link, thanks. Not much substance there about this though!

> One of the areas where he personally had been wide of the mark was on AI’s short-term impact on entry-level white-collar jobs, which had not been nearly as bad as he had once predicted, he said. “I’m delighted to be wrong about that.”

I'm not sure that justifies a whole "Sam Altman ... walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions" headline, personally. It's pretty thin.

But... we still haven't seen the full interview, so there might be more to it. The Fortune article also includes:

> Altman added that he’s taken a lot of flack for his hype, but better safe than sorry.”People are like, ‘Oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at the time I was like, ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it.’ and it still may.”

[windexh8er]

For those that write and shill for these orgs, almost full time, I could see how this type of admission is damning.

[simonw]

I don't understand what you're saying here.

(Personally I would love to see Sam and Dario credibly walk back their jobs doomerism talk, but I don't think the facts match the headline in this case.)

[windexh8er]

But you also don't know. So, it seems like a contradiction.

Also, for fun, I asked Opus 4.8 to confirm or deny this... Full text:

""" Confirmed. The quote is accurate. Altman said it on May 26, 2026, during a virtual interview at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) technology conference in Sydney, in conversation with CBA CEO Matt Comyn. He was speaking remotely to the conference about AI's impact on jobs. (International Business Times) The fuller context: Altman was walking back his own earlier predictions about AI-driven job loss. He framed the remark by saying he was "delighted to be wrong about this," then added that he thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened. (eWEEK) He continued: "I now think I understand more about why it hasn't, and I'm obviously grateful, but that is an area where my intuitions were just off." (Time) His explanation for the miss centered on human interaction. He argued that human interaction remains an irreplaceable component of many jobs and that even as AI handles routine tasks, there is a "human part" of employment that can't be substituted. (International Business Times) He mentioned that after trying to delegate his own Slack and email responses to AI and then returning to doing them manually, he concluded "we really do care about our interactions with people." (Breitbart) A few contextual points worth flagging: The reversal is notable because Altman had said the opposite roughly a year earlier. On the Uncapped podcast with his brother Jack in June 2025, he had predicted many jobs would disappear due to AI, though he expected new opportunities to emerge. (Breitbart) The remark functions partly as a contrast with rivals. It lands as an implicit rebuke of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has warned that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and push unemployment to 10–20%. (OfficeChai) Some coverage notes the timing. Several outlets point out the softened messaging comes as both OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly prepare for IPOs, each at valuations around $1 trillion (Breitbart) — which is context certain reporters are offering as possible motivation, not something Altman himself stated. It's also worth a caveat on sourcing: the quote itself is consistent across many outlets (Time, Reuters via Fast Company, IBTimes, eWeek), so I'm confident in its accuracy and attribution. Some of the surrounding framing (the IPO angle, the Amodei "rebuke" characterization) reflects editorial interpretation rather than Altman's words. """

[simonw]

Wow, that's a bad answer from Claude. I looks like it cited half a dozen publications who all pretty much just copied and pasted the same tiny fragment of quote from each other.

Note that I'm not denying he said those things, just that I don't think there's a credible path from a couple of sentences in that one interview on Tuesday to headlines like "Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions".

(It's amusing to me how many people accuse me of "hype" while simultaneously being quite happy to consume hyped headlines that match their priors.)

[windexh8er]

Hype or not, you can't seem to confirm or deny either. So, again...

[simonw]

I'm lost, what am I supposed to be confirming or denying here?

[cactusplant7374]

Altman has said he thought AI would have a bigger impact.