Gary Peters Presses OpenAI CEO On Mitigating Potential ‘Social Disruption’ Of AI Eliminating Jobs

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During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) questioned Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, about job loss due to developing artificial intelligence.

Transcript

00:00Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to all of our witnesses. Thank you for

00:05being here. It's an incredibly important topic, and we appreciate your expertise.

00:11As we're looking at making sure that the United States is the world leader in AI,

00:16certainly we've been talking about supply chains and infrastructure and all of those aspects,

00:21but one area that I want to particularly focus on is workforce and people to make sure that we

00:25have the talent there. That's why I authored the AI Scholarship for Service Act and the AI Training

00:32Act. Both of those were signed into law in 2022. Earlier this year, I introduced my AI and Critical

00:39Technology Workforce Framework Act to continue the effort along those lines and love to work with

00:46each of you as we look at other legislation necessary to make sure we've got the workforce

00:51trained to take advantage of this amazing technology. I do want to do a shout out to the

00:57University of Michigan that actually became the first university in the world to provide generative

01:01AI tools for their entire student body to prepare them for the workforce of tomorrow. So I want to

01:09talk a little bit about the workforce, but Mr. Altman, when we met last year in my office and had a great

01:15conversation, you said that upwards of 70% of jobs could be eliminated by AI, and you acknowledge that

01:23the possible social disruption of this. If that's happening, we have to prepare for it. We're not

01:28going to stand in the way of the incredible opportunities here, but if this is indeed going to

01:32occur, we've got to be thinking pretty deeply about how that will be managed and make sure that

01:38everybody can benefit from AI, not just a select few that benefit. So talk to me about how you believe

01:44leaders in your industry can help mitigate job losses or deal with what could, as you described

01:52it last year, a major social disruption. The thing that I think is different this time than previous

01:58technological revolutions is the potential speed. Technological revolutions have impacted jobs and

02:05the economy for a long time. Some jobs go away, some new jobs get created, many jobs just get more

02:10efficient, and people are able to do more and earn more money and create more, and that's great.

02:16Over some period of time, society can adapt to a huge amount of job change, and you can look at the

02:21last couple of centuries and see how much that's happened. I don't know, I don't think anyone knows

02:26exactly how fast this is going to go, but it feels like it could be pretty fast.

02:30The most important thing, or one of the most important things I think we can do is to put tools

02:37in the hands of people early. We have a principle that we call iterative deployment. We want people

02:42to be getting used to this technology as it's developed. We've been doing this now for almost

02:47five years since our first product launch. As society and this technology co-evolve, putting great,

02:56capable tools in the hands of a lot of people and letting them figure out the new things that they're

03:00going to do and create for each other and come up with and provide sort of value back to the world

03:05on top of this new building block we have and the sort of scaffolding of society, that is, I think,

03:12the best thing we can do as open AI and as our industry to be a sort of help smooth this transition.

03:19The idea we want to get to a point where AI isn't displacing work, but actually enhancing work,

03:25that people are more productive and doing things that we probably can't even imagine what people will do

03:29if we look a hundred years ago, we have jobs that no one dreamed actually occur.

03:33And I don't think we can imagine the jobs on the other side of this, but even if you look today

03:37at what's happening with programming, which I'll pick because it's sort of my background and near

03:41and dear to my heart, what it means to be a programmer and an effective programmer in May of 2025

03:47is very different than what it meant last time I was here in May of 2023.

03:51These tools have really changed what a programmer is capable of, the amount of code and software

03:57that the world is going to get.

03:58And it's not like people don't hire software engineers anymore.

04:01Right.

04:01They work in a different way and they're way more productive.

04:04Right.

04:05Right.

04:05Dr. Hsu, we certainly talk a lot about open source AI, but most of the conversation has been about software.

04:13However, making technology open and able to work together matters at every level, as you know,

04:18from chips that power the devices to the servers that are running behind the scenes.

04:23So a question for you is, you know, what are the benefits of open standards and system interoperability

04:29at the hardware level, not the software level?

04:32And what are the implications for innovation, national security, as well as resilience in the supply chain?

04:38Yeah.

04:38Thank you for the question, Senator.

04:39I think there are an incredible number of advantages to having an open ecosystem at the hardware

04:45and the software and the application level.

04:47Now, the idea is, you know, there's no one organization or one group that has all the good ideas.

04:52And so enabling the ecosystem to work together so that you can choose the best solution at every level

04:59and then also optimization across a broad set of constituents is a good thing.

05:06I think it's also very good from a security standpoint to ensure that, you know, again,

05:11there are many choices so that we're not dependent on a single ecosystem.

05:15So, you know, we continue to be very forward thinking in open standards as well as open ecosystems.

05:20So your model is an open model.

05:23I understand NVIDIA is a closed model.

05:26What are the advantages, disadvantages?

05:28What should we be thinking about?

05:29I think the major advantage in an open model, and that is something that we very much support,

05:34is the idea that we can have innovation come from many different parties.

05:39And, you know, whether that is hardware innovation, so on the different chips,

05:43or that is system innovation on putting all these things together.

05:46And, you know, our goal is to make sure that we always have the best of the best.

05:50And there are many different ways, many different parties that can contribute to that.

05:54And that's why we are very forward-leaning in terms of open ecosystems.

05:58Great. Thank you.

06:00Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

06:01Thank you. Senator Fetterman.

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