Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, on Sunday expressed concerns about the job market’s potential disruption as artificial general intelligence (AGI) evolves.
He suggests that the impact might be uneven, with some industries experiencing little change while sectors like scientific research could progress at unprecedented rates.
Altman notes that public policy and societal attitudes are crucial as AGI integrates into everyday life. “The balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention,” he said.
Altman argues that AGI will permeate the economy, driving the cost of goods down while increasing luxury and scarce resources. This transition might necessitate novel policy approaches to ensure equitable benefit distribution.
He proposes unusual ideas, such as allocating a “compute budget” for universal AI access, and emphasizes the importance of balancing safety with empowerment.
Altman anticipates that by 2035, individuals should harness intellectual capabilities equivalent to the collective knowledge of the present decade.
The Bigger Picture: The conversation about AGI’s socioeconomic implications comes as OpenAI intensifies its efforts in AI deployment.
China’s DeepSeek made waves in the market with the launch of its R1 reasoning model and US companies are responding by ramping-up both shipping times and budget.
OpenAI has, in a span of month, launched its first two AI agents — Operator and Deep Research, as well as the gpt-o3-mini series that has outperformed the benchmarks of both DeepSeek’s R1 and OpenAI’s own prior o1 model.
This evolution in AI technology brings about the need for robust policies.
As history suggests, technological advancements often improve metrics like health and economic prosperity but rarely solve inequality autonomously.
The debate now centers around interventions — whether compute budgets or novel economic structures — can create a fairer distribution of AI’s benefits.
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