Over the weekend, the New York Times dropped a story about how computer science graduates are so hard up for jobs that they’ve been forced to look for work at Chipotle. The reason? Many people are blaming AI, which has increasingly eaten into the job market for entry-level coders. Not everybody is worried about this, however. Sam Altman, the CEO of one of the most successful AI companies in the world, says that recent college grads should really be grateful for their current situation.
Fortune originally noted that, during a recent appearance on Cleo Abram’s Huge If True podcast, Altman called the current generation of college graduates “the luckiest kids in all of history” and said that those lucky kids would adapt to the changing economic realities presented by AI. “This always happens,” Altman said, apparently referring to technological change and societal disruption. “Young people are the best at adapting to this. I’m more worried about what it means, not for the 22-year-old, but for the 62-year-old that doesn’t want to go retrain or reskill or whatever the politicians call it,” he said.
Other weird things Altman said during the podcast:
- Technological development will lead to “completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting” jobs.
- “There’s never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new.”
- “A kid born today will never be smarter than AI.”
Setting aside the fact that Altman’s GPT-5 just shit the bed so hard that his company had to give coders the option of reverting back to GPT-4, I think it’s safe to assume that much of what the tech executive says here is just PR fluff for his business. Take the thing about AI being “smarter” than human children. The idea that AI—which is largely a language prediction algorithm on par with auto-correct—is “smart” in the same way that a human teenager is smart is a long-disproven fallacy. AI has no consciousness, despite what executives like Altman would lead you to believe. It is a software program designed to regurgitate language. As The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper recently put it:
To call AI a con isn’t to say that the technology is not remarkable, that it has no use, or that it will not transform the world (perhaps for the better) in the right hands. It is to say that AI is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking—and, soon, feeling—machines…Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another.
If AI isn’t particularly good at thinking, one thing it is good at is replacing entry-level positions at tech companies. The New York Times notes that the unemployment rate for computer science nerds seems to have skyrocketed this year:
Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.
Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for comment.
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