.
While on his visit to Berlin to receive the Axel Springer Award for visionary leaders, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that artificial intelligence will soon automate 40% of work tasks.
On September 24, Altman received the Axel Springer Award for his role in advancing AI. The annual non-monetary prize is awarded by the German media company Axel Springer SE, whose past recipients included many famous CEOs, like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
During his stay in Berlin, Altman gave a wide-ranging interview to WELT Editor-in-Chief Jan Philipp Burgard, where he shared his thoughts on everything from why he doesn’t take relationship advice from ChatGPT to why it can’t replace the president of the U.S. But the most interesting part — for me, at least — was his prediction that AI will automate 40% of work tasks.
Love reading and writing? Submit a post to our blog.
Unlike his rival Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who said that AI will replace 50% of white-collar jobs, Altman was more cautious in his assessment. “I find it useful to think about tasks, not the percentage of jobs,” he said. “I can easily imagine a world where 30 to 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future.”
Altman also said, that his company’s latest AI model, GPT-5, is “already smarter than me” and “is capable of doing incredible things that many people find very impressive.”
In his view, such comparison is justified because “by 2030” the technology will be able to make scientific discoveries that humans can’t make on their own. “That’ll start to feel like something we could properly call superintelligence,” he added.
When Burgard asked him what education he would advice his son to pursue so that his job won’t be replaced by AI, Altman said, “The meta-skill of learning how to learn, of learning to adapt, learning to be resilient to a lot of change. I mentioned this earlier, but learning how to figure out what people want, how to make useful products and services for them, and how to interact with the world.”
When asked about what quality of his AI will never be able to replace, Altman said that it will be the ability to “care about other people and what they do, how much people want to interact with other people.”
I’m a freelance writer with 6 years of experience in SEO blogging and article publishing. While you’re here, get the latest updates by subscribing to my newsletter.
