Artificial Intelligence

A.I. Predictions Failing To Come True

Plus: Democrats taking a new tack, the popularity of social media bans, an influencer correspondent, and more...

Liz Wolfe | 7.6.2026 9:30 AM

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(Illustration: Lex Villena; Midjourney)

Right/wrong: "A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI was going to wipe out jobs. For the past month or so, tech CEOs have been striking a more optimistic tone," reports The Wall Street Journal's Katherine Bindley, citing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's comments several months ago that "we've been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications."

It's not clear whether Altman, and his rival/counterpart Dario Amodei at Anthropic (who recently went from warning that half of entry-level jobs could be demolished to citing how firms can "do the same thing with less resources"), are toning down their predictions because they're trying not to alarm people, because they were in fact somewhat wrong, or because, a year-plus ago, they were trying to build additional hype in the arms race. Maybe all of the above.

Of course, all of this will be hard to untangle in the future. Tech CEOs love blaming layoffs on A.I., when sometimes that's not the case at all.

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