Sam Altman: AI Is Killing Labor-Capital Balance

Sam Altman doesn't usually admit what he can't solve. But at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, the OpenAI CEO did exactly that.

"Data centers are getting blamed for electricity price hikes. Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI," Altman said, acknowledging that AI has become a convenient scapegoat for corporate downsizing. Some companies, he acknowledged, are guilty of what he's previously called "AI washing"—blaming job cuts on automation whether or not that's actually why people lost their jobs.

But here's the thing—Altman confirmed the underlying anxiety is legitimate.

"I saw a quote online that's been sticking in my head," he said. "For centuries, maybe millennia, humans have learned how to structure society to manage scarcity. Now we have to quickly learn the opposite—managing abundance. That's a real change to how capitalism has worked."

The shift, he argued, is already here. "If it's hard in many of our current jobs to outwork a GPU, then that changes" the fundamental power balance between labor and capital. And when asked what to do about it? "If there was an easy consensus answer, we'd have done it by now. So I don't think anyone knows what to do."

Altman laid out a vision of where he sees things heading. AI has crossed a threshold into "major economic utility," he said—rapidly evolving from simple coding assistance to executing complex knowledge-work tasks. A new generation of startups is already deliberately avoiding large head counts, instead investing heavily in computing power. In India, he noted, entrepreneurs are attempting to build "zero person" startups, relying entirely on AI prompts to write software, handle legal work, and manage customer support.

The C-suite isn't immune either. Altman predicted that by late 2028, the cognitive capacity inside data centers will eclipse human capacity outside them. "The leaders of major organizations—including CEOs, presidents, and top scientists—will be entirely unable to perform their duties without heavy reliance on AI supervision and assistance."

OpenAI's answer is to flood the world with intelligence. "We want to flood the world with intelligence," Altman said. "We want people to just use it for everything." That means massive infrastructure—gigawatt data center campuses, pursued in partnership with North American building trades unions to expand pathways for construction workers.

But he didn't sugarcoat the transition. "The next few years are going to be a painful adjustment," Altman warned. "Very intense and uncomfortable debates" over how to reshape society are coming. Traditional economic metrics like GDP might plummet in what he called a "forever deflationary world."

It's a stark contrast to the optimistic tone from some AI executives. But Altman has long walked this line—back in December, he insisted he's "not a long-term jobs doomer" and believes humanity will eventually invent new roles. The gap between that long-term optimism and short-term realism? That's where we are now.