Tech leaders are divided on whether AI will cause mass job destruction or create new roles.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei said AI may cut 50% of white-collar roles. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang disagrees.
From Sam Altman to Demis Hassabis, here’s what AI leaders are saying about the AI jobs debate.
AI leaders are split on whether AI will take over jobs or create new roles that mitigate disruption.
It’s a long-running debate — but one that has been heating up in recent months. While tech leaders seem to agree that AI is shaking up jobs, they are divided over timelines and scale.
From Jensen Huang to Sam Altman, here is what some of the biggest names in tech are saying about how AI will impact jobs.
Dario Amodei
AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. That was the stark warning from Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming. I don’t think this is on people’s radar,” Amodei told Axios in an interview published in May.
He said he wanted to share his concerns to get the government and other AI companies to prepare the country for what’s to come, adding that unemployment could spike to between 10% and 20% in the next five years.
He said that entry-level jobs are especially at risk, adding that AI companies and the government need to stop “sugarcoating” the risks of mass job elimination in fields including technology, finance, law, and consulting.
Jensen Huang
Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, was withering when asked about Amodei’s comments. “I pretty much disagree with almost everything he says,” Huang said. Amodei “thinks AI is so scary,” but only Anthropic “should do it,” he continued. An Anthropic spokesperson told BI that Amodei had never made that claim.
“Do I think AI will change jobs? It will change everyone’s — it’s changed mine,” Huang told reporters on the sidelines of Vivatech in Paris in June. He also said that some roles would disappear, but said that AI could also unlock creative opportunities.
Yann LeCun
Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, wrote a short LinkedIn post just after Huang dismissed Amodei, saying, “I agree with Jensen and, like him, pretty much disagree with everything Dario says.”
LeCun has previously taken a more optimistic stance on AI’s impact on jobs. Speaking at Nvidia’s GTC conference in March, LeCun said that AI could replace people but challenged whether humans would allow that to happen.
“I mean basically our relationship with future AI systems, including superintelligence, is that we’re going to be their boss,” he said.
Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis, the cofounder of Google DeepMind, said in June that AI would create “very valuable jobs” and “supercharge sort of technically savvy people who are at the forefront of using these technologies.” He told London Tech Week attendees that humans were “infinitely adaptable.”
He said he’d still recommend young people study STEM subjects, saying it was “still important to understand fundamentals” in areas including mathematics, physics, and computer science to understand “how these systems are put together.”
Geoffrey Hinton
You would have to be “very skilled” to have an AI-proof job, Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI,” has said.
“For mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody,” Hinton told the “Diary of a CEO” podcast in June. He flagged paralegals as at risk, and said he’d be “terrified” if he worked in a call center.
Hinton said that, eventually, the technology would “get to be better than us at everything,” but said some fields were safer, and that it would be, “a long time before it’s as good at physical manipulation.
“So a good bet would be to be a plumber,” he added.
Sam Altman
“AI is for sure going to change a lot of jobs” and “totally take some jobs away, create a bunch of new ones,” Altman said during a May episode of “The Circuit” podcast.
The OpenAI CEO said that although people might be aware that AI can be better at some tasks, like programming or customer support, the world “is not ready for” humanoid robots.
“I don’t think the world has really had the humanoid robots moment yet,” he said, describing a scenario where people could encounter “like seven robots that walk past you” on the street.
“It’s gonna feel very sci-fi. And I don’t think that’s very far away from like a visceral ‘oh man, this is gonna do a lot of things that people used to do,'” he added.
Speaking at the Snowflake Summit in June, Altman said AI agents are already acting like junior employees.
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