Sam Altman's thank-you note to programmers landed like a pink slip. Amid sweeping tech layoffs and mounting anxiety over artificial intelligence, the OpenAI CEO on Tuesday posted on X that he feels "so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character," adding that it's already hard to recall "how much effort it really took" and thanking them "for getting us to this point." Many readers heard a subtext: your work made us, now we'll replace you, per Futurism.
Responses were scathing, with one user replying, "Nice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away." "He just casually said, Pack your bags now every new software will be created with AI," wrote another. A third user summed up the message as saying, "I have taken your jobs but thank you for helping me get to the point where I do that easily," per KRON. Others directed insults at Altman directly.
The backlash comes as companies increasingly cite AI when trimming staff. Thousands of tech workers have been laid off and 25% of programming jobs have disappeared within the last two years, according to VentureBeat. However, as recently as last year, Altman said he was less interested in replacing coders with AI than in helping them become "10x productive" with AI assistance. Still, the way things are going, critics see Altman's post less as gratitude than as a public reminder of who's holding the leverage in an AI-driven shakeup of white-collar work.
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