Sam Altman said AI agents are acting like junior colleagues — and he's betting that AI could soon 'discover new knowledge'
"You hear people that talk about their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, look at the quality, figure out how it fits together, give feedback, and it sounds a lot like how they work with a team of still relatively junior employees," Altman said of AI agents on Monday during the Snowflake Summit 2025, in a conversation with Snowflake Computing CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy.
"I would bet next year that in some limited cases, at least in some small ways, we start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge, or can figure out solutions to business problems that are kind of very non-trivial," Altman added.
The keynote conversation at Snowflake Summit — which explored how organizations can drive immediate impact with the power of AI — comes as new data show that AI is already replacing human workers.
Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at Revelio Labs, spoke to Business Insider's Aki Ito about her analysis of online job postings and the impact of AI since ChatGPT's release at the end of 2022. As Ito wrote, "She found that over the past three years, the share of AI-doable tasks in online job postings has declined by 19%." In roles Munyikwa pinpointed as more vulnerable to AI, such as database administrators and IT specialists, the hiring downturn has been as steep as 31%.
Over the past quarter, Shopify said that its managers need to explain why a job couldn't be handled by AI before asking for new hires, and Duolingo, the language learning app, said it would replace contract workers with AI.
In February, OpenAI launched GPT-4.5, which Altman called "the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person." He also described the model as "giant" and "expensive." The rollout is limited to Pro subscribers until the shortage of GPUs is solved.
OpenAI also recently launched Codex, a new AI agent aimed at streamlining coding tasks for developers by writing code, fixing bugs, and running tests. Altman said it was already in use by OpenAI's own engineers. Unlike traditional chatbots, the multitasking AI agent can also interact with external software to complete tasks like making a dinner reservation.
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