AI Is Actually Creating Jobs, OpenAI's Sam Altman Says — and He's Surprised Too

Sam Altman is surprised by his own industry. The OpenAI CEO posted on X Sunday that he’s “quite certain” artificial intelligence has created new jobs so far — a conclusion he didn’t expect to reach at this stage of AI’s development.

“I’m not as pessimistic as others, but I assumed that by the time AI reached its current capability level, we would have already seen some impact on the job market,” Altman wrote. He described the job-creation trend as likely to continue.

Altman’s admission is notable because it cuts against the dominant narrative. For two years, the public conversation around AI and employment has been largely about what jobs will disappear. Headlines focus on automation risk, displacement, and the industries most vulnerable to generative AI. Altman is suggesting that the data so far tells a different story — or at least a more complicated one.

He didn’t provide specific numbers or studies. The claim rests on his observation of the industry from the inside: companies hiring for AI-related roles, new categories of work emerging around model training, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and AI operations, and businesses that didn’t exist a few years ago now employing thousands of people.

In an interview in February, Altman offered a more nuanced view. He acknowledged that AI is reshaping the labor market in real ways, but argued that some companies are using AI as cover for layoffs they had already planned. “It’s hard to determine the exact proportion, but there is definitely a phenomenon of ‘AI washing’ — some companies attributing layoffs to AI that would have happened anyway,” he said at the time.

He also conceded that genuine job displacement is happening and will accelerate. “In the coming years, the real impact of AI replacing jobs will become more visible,” Altman said. But he maintains that new career forms will emerge alongside the disruption — the question is whether the pace of new-job creation matches the pace of displacement.

Altman’s public comments on AI and labor have evolved over time. Earlier this year, he stepped back from earlier visions of full automation, arguing that human-AI collaboration is the more realistic near-term future. His latest post suggests he’s watching the same data everyone else is — and drawing a slightly more optimistic conclusion than the headlines suggest.