The world has been witnessing turbulent times since 2020- a global pandemic that took away 15 million lives, raging wars that’s hurting economies and now the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) that’s all set to disrupt the global workforce.
It won’t be overreaching to say that professionals aged between 25-50 are going through high levels of anxiety, unsure of what the future holds for them.
Take these statistics into perspective- a report by World Economic Forum (WEF) projects 92 million jobs to be displaced globally by 2030. The Goldman Sachs estimates run even wilder- 300 million full time jobs could be affected by Generative AI.
Those aren’t just numbers. Those are people tryna get by- artists, authors, managers, analysts, sales representatives, admin, coders, engineers, nurses, teachers, journalists- folks that have spent years honing a specific skill that helped them earn their bread and butter.
In that context, Sam Altman, the swashbuckling CEO of OpenAI- world’s most commercially successful AI organization, took to X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday to express his gratitude to software engineers who coded from scratch so that his AI models could train on them, emulate them.. And REPLACE THEM (saying the quiet part loud).
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.
Thank you for getting us to this point.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 17, 2026
For the uninitiated, the tweet by Altman might seem as a humble note of appreciation-like a pupil who never forgot his fourth grade mathematics teacher in school.
But we are initiated, aren’t we Sam?
OpenAI, which was founded as a not-for-profit organization for the “welfare of humanity” back in 2015 by a group of leading tech entrepreneurs, has slowly and stealthily moved forward to become a controlled “for-profit public benefit corporation.” With 800 million users worldwide, OpenAI has a whopping $20 billion annualized revenue run rate.
However, that revenue comes at the cost of gigabytes of data that their AI model trained upon for years under “fair use” policy. Data that was conceptualized and created from scratch by people, whose very jobs are under threat due to their pupil.
Altman expresses his gratitude to engineers yet simultaneously announces their erasure by saying, “it already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took”. That basically translates to- your lifework will soon turn into fossil and god willing, fossil fuel for my AI models one day.
What’s missing in Altman’s tweet is the acknowledgement that OpenAI is literally taking away thousands of jobs as we speak. Jobs aren’t being taken away due to some natural force. It is you and your company, Sam and also your counterparts.
According to multiple survey reports, computer programmers are one of the most exposed professionals due to AI automation. Their erasure is literally being hatched at this moment by autonomous AI agents who have literally trained on the data provided by them only.
In that context, I am reminded of a satirical tale written by legendary Hindi satirist Harishankar Parsai titled ‘Wolves and Sheep’.
In the story, elections are being held in the jungle and sheep are excited because they form a 90% majority, and hence poised for a landmark victory. However, the leader of wolves (who are 5% in jungle populace), does an image makeover, and manages to win the trust of sheep, by acknowledging their concerns and promising to protect them. Post elections, the wolves are chosen as representatives of sheep and they introduce the first bill in the jungle assembly that reads- “every wolf is entitled to a lamb for breakfast, an entire sheep for lunch and from a health point of view, half a sheep for dinner.”
Sam Altman’s tweet is the wolf’s image makeover. The bill is already being drafted.
Also Read: With Anthropic, AI Companies are Finally Realizing How It Feels to be Scraped
