- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said human ability will still be valued, but it won’t be “raw, intellectual horsepower.” In a podcast interview earlier this month, he also talked about the emergence of agentic AI.
Whether you like it or not, artificial intelligence is beginning to reach a point where the world economy and the workforce will be completely changed, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
On a Jan. 6 episode of the Re:Thinking podcast hosted by Adam Grant, Altman opened up about his ideas on the shifts that AI is going to spur.
“Eventually, I think the whole economy transforms,” he said. “We always find new jobs, even though every time we stare at a new technology, we assume they’re all going to go away.”
While he acknowledged that some jobs do go away, people also find better things to do too, and Altman predicted that’s what will happen with AI, saying it’s the next step in technological progress.
Then Grant pointed to an idea that human agility will be valued amid the AI revolution, rather than ability. Altman said ability will still be valued, but it won’t be “raw, intellectual horsepower.”
“I mean, the kind of dumb version of this would be figuring out what questions to ask will be more important than figuring out the answer,” he added.
Later in the conversation, the AI mogul described the evolution of humans interacting with earlier forms of artificial intelligence.
He cited AI’s beginnings playing chess and losing to humans, then AI surpassing a person’s ability to play chess. Ultimately, AI and humans working together in chess beat an AI team.
Then Altman pointed out he is expecting a child soon and noted the differences his child will face.
“My kid is never gonna grow up being smarter than AI,” he said, noting that children in the future will only know a world with AI in it.
“And that’ll be natural,” Altman added. “And of course it’s smarter than us. Of course, it can do things we can’t, but also who really cares? I think it’s only weird for us in this one transition time.”
As AI is progressing, deep learning is reaching its agentic stage. An agent refers to how AI can autonomously perform tasks on the user’s behalf.
Earlier this week, Altman and company tapped into its first rendition of agents by releasing a new feature on ChatGPT called “Tasks.” This addition allows users to curate reminders or comprehensive summaries of current events.
Later this month, the company is planning to release a boosted agent dubbed “Operator,” Bloomberg reported. This feature has the capabilities to write code and even book travel.
In his keynote speech at CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that agentic AI is surging, noting that it will create a multitrillion-dollar industry.
“AI agents are the new digital workforce,” he said.
On the Re:Thinking podcast, Altman also tried to predict where he thinks agentic AI is headed as the technology continues to progress.
“Not like we can go give them a task where they program for three hours, but where we can have them go off and do something very complicated that would normally require like a whole organization over many years,” he said. “And I suspect we’ll have to figure out new models again.”