During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) questioned Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, about job loss due to developing artificial intelligence.
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00:00Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to all of our witnesses. Thank you for
00:05being here. It's an incredibly important topic, and we appreciate your expertise.
00:11As we're looking at making sure that the United States is the world leader in AI,
00:16certainly we've been talking about supply chains and infrastructure and all of those aspects,
00:21but one area that I want to particularly focus on is workforce and people to make sure that we
00:25have the talent there. That's why I authored the AI Scholarship for Service Act and the AI Training
00:32Act. Both of those were signed into law in 2022. Earlier this year, I introduced my AI and Critical
00:39Technology Workforce Framework Act to continue the effort along those lines and love to work with
00:46each of you as we look at other legislation necessary to make sure we've got the workforce
00:51trained to take advantage of this amazing technology. I do want to do a shout out to the
00:57University of Michigan that actually became the first university in the world to provide generative
01:01AI tools for their entire student body to prepare them for the workforce of tomorrow. So I want to
01:09talk a little bit about the workforce, but Mr. Altman, when we met last year in my office and had a great
01:15conversation, you said that upwards of 70% of jobs could be eliminated by AI, and you acknowledge that
01:23the possible social disruption of this. If that's happening, we have to prepare for it. We're not
01:28going to stand in the way of the incredible opportunities here, but if this is indeed going to
01:32occur, we've got to be thinking pretty deeply about how that will be managed and make sure that
01:38everybody can benefit from AI, not just a select few that benefit. So talk to me about how you believe
01:44leaders in your industry can help mitigate job losses or deal with what could, as you described
01:52it last year, a major social disruption. The thing that I think is different this time than previous
01:58technological revolutions is the potential speed. Technological revolutions have impacted jobs and
02:05the economy for a long time. Some jobs go away, some new jobs get created, many jobs just get more
02:10efficient, and people are able to do more and earn more money and create more, and that's great.
02:16Over some period of time, society can adapt to a huge amount of job change, and you can look at the
02:21last couple of centuries and see how much that's happened. I don't know, I don't think anyone knows
02:26exactly how fast this is going to go, but it feels like it could be pretty fast.
02:30The most important thing, or one of the most important things I think we can do is to put tools
02:37in the hands of people early. We have a principle that we call iterative deployment. We want people
02:42to be getting used to this technology as it's developed. We've been doing this now for almost
02:47five years since our first product launch. As society and this technology co-evolve, putting great,
02:56capable tools in the hands of a lot of people and letting them figure out the new things that they're
03:00going to do and create for each other and come up with and provide sort of value back to the world
03:05on top of this new building block we have and the sort of scaffolding of society, that is, I think,
03:12the best thing we can do as open AI and as our industry to be a sort of help smooth this transition.
03:19The idea we want to get to a point where AI isn't displacing work, but actually enhancing work,
03:25that people are more productive and doing things that we probably can't even imagine what people will do
03:29if we look a hundred years ago, we have jobs that no one dreamed actually occur.
03:33And I don't think we can imagine the jobs on the other side of this, but even if you look today
03:37at what's happening with programming, which I'll pick because it's sort of my background and near
03:41and dear to my heart, what it means to be a programmer and an effective programmer in May of 2025
03:47is very different than what it meant last time I was here in May of 2023.
03:51These tools have really changed what a programmer is capable of, the amount of code and software
03:57that the world is going to get.
03:58And it's not like people don't hire software engineers anymore.
04:01Right.
04:01They work in a different way and they're way more productive.
04:04Right.
04:05Right.
04:05Dr. Hsu, we certainly talk a lot about open source AI, but most of the conversation has been about software.
04:13However, making technology open and able to work together matters at every level, as you know,
04:18from chips that power the devices to the servers that are running behind the scenes.
04:23So a question for you is, you know, what are the benefits of open standards and system interoperability
04:29at the hardware level, not the software level?
04:32And what are the implications for innovation, national security, as well as resilience in the supply chain?
04:38Yeah.
04:38Thank you for the question, Senator.
04:39I think there are an incredible number of advantages to having an open ecosystem at the hardware
04:45and the software and the application level.
04:47Now, the idea is, you know, there's no one organization or one group that has all the good ideas.
04:52And so enabling the ecosystem to work together so that you can choose the best solution at every level
04:59and then also optimization across a broad set of constituents is a good thing.
05:06I think it's also very good from a security standpoint to ensure that, you know, again,
05:11there are many choices so that we're not dependent on a single ecosystem.
05:15So, you know, we continue to be very forward thinking in open standards as well as open ecosystems.
05:20So your model is an open model.
05:23I understand NVIDIA is a closed model.
05:26What are the advantages, disadvantages?
05:28What should we be thinking about?
05:29I think the major advantage in an open model, and that is something that we very much support,
05:34is the idea that we can have innovation come from many different parties.
05:39And, you know, whether that is hardware innovation, so on the different chips,
05:43or that is system innovation on putting all these things together.
05:46And, you know, our goal is to make sure that we always have the best of the best.
05:50And there are many different ways, many different parties that can contribute to that.
05:54And that's why we are very forward-leaning in terms of open ecosystems.
05:58Great. Thank you.
06:00Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
06:01Thank you. Senator Fetterman.