![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-2265445153-e1773322861661.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tackled the growing public skepticism surrounding artificial intelligence, acknowledging the warning from President Donald Trump that AI is facing a major public relations problem. Moreover, the tech executive validated widespread anxieties about the future of employment, admitting that the traditional balance between labor and capital is shifting drastically.<\/p>\n
Addressing the current backlash, Altman noted that AI has become a widespread scapegoat for corporate downsizing and rising utility costs. \u201cData centers are getting blamed for electricity prices hikes. Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI,\u201d Altman explained, recalling his recent warning that some companies were engaging in what\u2019s called \u201cAI washing,\u201d in blaming layoffs on new tech regardless if that was the reason for those layoffs in the first place. However, while some of the immediate blame might be misplaced, Altman confirmed that the underlying threat to traditional employment is grounded in reality.<\/p>\n
He said he saw a quote online that\u2019s been sticking in his head, around how for centuries, maybe millennia, humans have learned how to structure society to manage scarcity, and now we have to quickly learn the opposite, managing \u201cabundance.\u201d \u201cSo that\u2019s, like, a real change to how capitalism has worked,\u201d he said, noting that capitalism has also depended on at least something of a power balance between labor and capital. \u201cBut if it\u2019s hard in many of our current jobs to outwork a GPU, then that changes.\u201d He said it, frankly, stumps him. \u201cIf there was an easy consensus answer, we\u2019d have done it by now, so I don\u2019t think anyone knows what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The AI landscape has crossed a threshold into \u201cmajor economic utility\u201d over the last few months, Altman claimed, rapidly evolving from simple coding assistance to executing complex tasks across various fields of knowledge work. Altman warned that the pace of this evolution is disorienting, and very soon, AI agents will be trusted to handle multi-day and multi-week tasks, operating proactively much like a senior human employee.<\/p>\n
This shift is already altering corporate behavior. A new generation of startups is deliberately avoiding large head counts, preferring instead to invest their capital heavily into computing power. In places like India, Altman observed entrepreneurs attempting to build \u201czero person\u201d startups, relying entirely on AI prompts to write software, handle legal work, and manage customer support.<\/p>\n
Even the C-suite won\u2019t be immune to this transformation, Altman warned. He predicted a future where the cognitive capacity inside data centers will eclipse human capacity outside of them, potentially by late 2028, implicitly recalling his rival Anthropic\u2019s warning that each AI cluster would have the brainpower of 50 million Nobel prize winners. Ultimately, Altman said he foresees a threshold where the leaders of major organizations\u2014including CEOs, presidents, and top scientists\u2014will be entirely unable to perform their duties without heavy reliance on AI supervision and assistance.<\/p>\n
To fuel this intelligence revolution, Altman said OpenAI is pursuing massive infrastructure buildouts, including gigawatt data center campuses, with the ultimate goal of making artificial intelligence \u201ctoo cheap to meter.\u201d He said, \u201cWe want to flood the world with intelligence, we want people to just use it for everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
To address the physical bottlenecks of this expansion, OpenAI has partnered with North American building trades unions to expand pathways for skilled construction workers, highlighting that massive physical infrastructure is necessary to support AI\u2019s digital growth. Altman envisions a future where intelligence is sold as a basic utility, like water or electricity, flooding the global market and fundamentally rewriting the rules of the economy.<\/p>\n
However, achieving this era of abundance will not be easy. Altman predicted that traditional economic metrics like GDP might plummet in a \u201cforever deflationary world,\u201d forcing society to rethink how it measures quality of life. Spookily, Altman was echoing the viral doomsday AI essay from Citrini Research that warned of spiralling deflation and \u201cghost GDP,\u201d leading to economic chaos within 18 months.<\/p>\n
While Altman insisted, back in December, he is \u201cnot a long-term jobs doomer\u201d and believes humanity will eventually invent new roles, he did not sugarcoat the immediate future. He warned that \u201cthe next few years are going to be a painful adjustment,\u201d heavily marked by \u201cvery intense and uncomfortable debates\u201d over how to reshape society. Several weeks ago, one of Altman\u2019s AI counterparts, Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, a Nobel prize winner himself, told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell that AI abundance will lead to a \u201ckind of new renaissance,\u201d but there will be a shakeout over the next 10 years en route to it.<\/p>\n
For this story,\u00a0Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/p>\n
#Sam #Altman #admits #killing #laborcapital #balanceand<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tackled the growing public skepticism…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[2505,2504,2508,1525,2506,2507,1209,406,2427,439],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}