Thousands of tech workers are being laid off, from Atlassian slashing 1,600 jobs to Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block firing almost half its workforce. Meta’s latest round of layoffs is rumored to affect an astonishing 20 percent or more of the company.
A common thread among these devastating cuts is industry leaders touting the capabilities of AI, claiming that the tech has made the workers who find themselves on the chopping block redundant. Whether those claims align with reality, or whether the layoffs are actually the result of corporate bloat and pandemic-era overhiring, is a topic of much debate.
In a Tuesday tweet that can only be described as twisting the knife, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that “I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character.”
“It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took,” he added. “Thank you for getting us to this point.”
It’s a particularly tone-deaf and borderline vindictive missive that suggests Altman has long given up on the idea of fairly compensating content creators and coders for their work. It’s no secret that OpenAI’s AI models were trained on data that was shamelessly scraped from the web, a controversial practice that has triggered a litany of copyright infringement lawsuits.
Altman’s remarks drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction.
“You’re welcome,” one user responded. “Nice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away.”
Others called him a “f***ing psychopath” and “scum.”
“Nothing says ‘you’re being replaced’ quite like a heartfelt thank you from the guy doing the replacing,” one user wrote.
The news comes as OpenAI desperately tries to keep up with the competition in an increasingly crowded enterprise and code-facing AI software landscape. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that executives had started ringing the alarm bells, calling for the company to double down on coding and enterprise customers.
“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” OpenAI’s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, told employees in a memo, as quoted by the WSJ. “We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic has made major strides, with its Claude Code and Cowork chatbots triggering a trillion-dollar selloff last month over concerns that AI could make legacy enterprise software a thing of the past.
In short, it’s difficult not to read Altman’s latest tweet as a sleight, directly capitalizing on widespread fears of an AI jobs apocalypse to tout the capabilities of his company’s offerings.
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