Let’s wait for people to lose their jobs! Sam Altman predicts: AGI will replace 40% of the global workforce by 2030
Sam Altman pointed out that AGI may be available before 2030, and 30% to 40% of work tasks will be reconstructed by AI, and the market and policy will face new tests.
(Preliminary briefing: Musk xAI enters the US government! Federal agencies will integrate Grok, and the annual fee of US$0.42 is half of OpenAI’s asking price)
(Background supplement: CoreWeave renewed OpenAI’s $6.5 billion order! 22.4 billion mg of magnesium was obtained in three contracts, and CRWV soared 238% this year)
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will "arrive by 2030, if not sooner," predicted a closed-door briefing.
According to The Outpost, Altman pointed out that the performance of GPT-5 "has surpassed personal intelligence in most aspects" and that the capabilities of the next generation model may even be increased tenfold. Faced with this unprecedented technological advance, capital, labor and policy are currently unprepared.
No room
Sam Altman’s prediction did not leave any room. He believed that the birth of AGI would rewrite the definition of “intelligence”, and the driving force for this result came from extremely large-scale computing power. According to Fortune Magazine, Altman has deployed a data center in Texas, USA, to provide energy and cooling equipment for subsequent models.
Faced with outside doubts, he only responded:
If the world wants to witness superintelligence, we must first prepare electricity and chips.
At the same time, Roman Yampolskiy, a professor at the University of Louisville, warned in an interview with Business Insider that the rapid advancement of AI may cause "99% of jobs" to evaporate.
30% to 40% task restructuring: unemployment or redivision of labor?
OpenAI puts the core unemployment figure at 30% to 40%. Sam Altman said in a conversation with The Neuron that AI will not erase the entire job at once, but will "cut away the programmable and predictable parts of the job." This will allow software engineers to first decompress their work and also usher in reconstruction.
Compared with fixed-track programming, jobs such as nursing and psychological counseling that require in-depth interpersonal interaction are still quite safe in the short term. Sam Altman emphasized that learning how to learn and human-centered creativity will be the hot core of the next wave of work. These abilities are regarded as "scarce abilities that cannot be copied by models" in the AI era.
At the same time, the World Economic Forum cited a report by AI Multiple and estimated that about 12% to 14% of workers will need to change jobs by 2030, which is significant but not a collapse. Research by Goldman Sachs and MIT also pointed out that the proportion of jobs that are "completely replaced" in the short term is low, and the long-term effect is an increase in productivity and the creation of new job openings.
Sam Altman claims to be "cautiously optimistic" on the issue of unemployment, and his investment actions appear to be very determined.
Will AGI really show up before 2030? It still takes time to verify. However, at present, computing power, capital and talents have already formed an alliance. "Slowing down" for major AI companies may mean staying on the outside. Facing the wave of super-intelligence, the only reliable way for ordinary workers to save themselves is to proactively learn on their own and prepare for large-scale adjustments to the social system.
