As much as Sam Altman is a household name in the AI space, he is not exactly popular with the coding community – the one whose jobs have been affected by his company’s popular AI model. Hence, when the OpenAI CEO put up a post on X (formerly Twitter) expressing his gratitude to developers and coders for building complex software “character-by-character”, it was not going to be taken well with most of the community. Altman’s post of gratitude to developers has now amassed a new controversy, in which coders are taking their time to get back at the CEO of the firm that makes ChatGPT.
In the post, Altman wrote, “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.”
The message quickly garnered over 3.2 million views, 26,000 likes, and thousands of replies within hours. Although Altman’s words appear to celebrate the foundational work that allows for today’s advanced AI systems, the coding community quickly started pointing out the massive job losses the technology has led to.
Sam Altman expresses gratitude, coders reply with taunts
While some developers appreciated the nod to their predecessors, the post drew significant backlash from the community. Critics accused Altman of sounding tone-deaf, pointing to widespread fears of job displacement caused by AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. Replies ranged from sarcastic to pointed accusations of data usage without compensation. Some users even referenced the decline of platforms like Stack Overflow, which have observed reduced traffic and relevance due to AI-generated answers.
An interesting comment stated, “And Rest in Peace Stack Overflow,” accompanied by a meme. Many coders highlighted irony, noting OpenAI’s reliance on vast datasets of human-written code to train its models. Many urged Altman to make the older GPT-4o model available to the community as an open source model, or simply bring it back alongside the newer models as an option. Here’s a look at some of the troll posts from the community.
Altman’s post amidst mega job layoffs due to AI
Altman’s post comes at a time when there are ongoing discussions about AI’s impact on the software industry. Recent reports have shown that entry-level coding roles are shrinking drastically as employers are trusting AI bots and services over human coders for junior roles. Critics have expressed concern about the lack of junior engineers who could lead projects in the future Altman’s message, while seemingly appreciative, has been interpreted by most as a subtle acknowledgment that the era of traditional “character-by-character” coding is fading fast.
Neither OpenAI nor Altman has issued further comments on the post. It remains to be seen whether the OpenAI CEO issues a follow-up post explaining his comment or something else.