OpenAI Pledges $250 Million to Help AI-Disrupted Workers

OpenAI’s non-profit arm is committing at least $250 million to help workers disrupted by AI.

This effort from the OpenAI Foundation will cover grants, partnerships and “direct work” to assist workers and economies impacted by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), according to a Wednesday (May 27) news release.

“Economic systems exist, in principle, to give people security, autonomy, and the ability to build purposeful lives. Too often they fall short,” the foundation said in the release.

“AI is going to lead to huge economic changes as it makes previously scarce capabilities far more widely available, and there is deep uncertainty about how far and how fast they will go.”

The range of possibilities offers an opportunity to develop systems that let people live better, but the pace of change means “the window to get this right is shorter than we’re used to, and the cost of getting it wrong is immense,” the foundation added.

The program will focus on investing in “independent measurement and forecasting infrastructure” to gain a clearer picture of AI’s effect on the economy, the release said.

It will also help support workers and communities “through near-term disruption,” as well as bolstering efforts to organize “post-AI political economies and sharing economic gains broadly for people around the world.”

The announcement comes amid debate among AI advocates about what impact AI will have on the world’s workers. Some foresee widespread layoffs, with companies already instituting job cuts as they embrace the technology.

Others say predictions of a “jobs apocalypse” are overblown. Among that group now is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently walked back earlier predictions about AI-related job loss.

“I’m delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” Altman said Tuesday at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney.

“I now think I understand more about why it hasn’t, and I’m obviously grateful but that is an area where my intuitions were just off,” he added.

Meanwhile, a recent PYMNTS Intelligence report, “The Resilience Deficit: Labor Workers in an Automated Economy,” finds that an increasing number of hourly workers in the U.S. are encountering AI in the workplace before they feel financially prepared for it.

“AI investment is accelerating across industries, and companies are increasingly framing automation as a productivity tool rather than an experimental technology,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week.

However, the data “suggested the bigger divide may not be about who encounters AI first. It may center on who has the resources to adapt once workplace changes begin.”