Sam Altman isn’t known for understatement, but even by his own standards, what he said on stage at OpenAI’s DevDay conference earlier this month was pretty problematic. In a live interview with AI newsletter founder Rowan Cheung, Altman made a sweeping claim that many jobs that vanish in the age of large language models might not have been “real work” in the first place.
Responding to a thought experiment about how a farmer from 50 years ago might view our current reality, Altman said, “The thing about that farmer… [is that] they very likely would look at what you do and I do and say, ‘that’s not real work.’” Altman said this makes him feel “a little less worried… [but] more worried in some ways. If you’re… farming… you’re doing something people really need. This is real work.”
