* Altman says AI has not yet caused the white-collar job

losses he once feared

* OpenAI chief admits he was wrong on AI's near-term

social and economic impact

* Says human interaction in many roles limits how far AI

can replace workers

By Scott Murdoch

SYDNEY, May 26 (Reuters) - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on

Tuesday the rapid development and adoption of AI would not lead

to a global "jobs apocalypse" and the technology had not claimed

as many white-collar jobs as he had feared.

Speaking at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia ( CBAUF )

conference in Sydney, Altman said he was initially concerned

about the impact AI would have on global employment levels.

He said he and his executives had been "roughly right" on

the technological predictions made by OpenAI when it launched

ChatGPT in 2022. But he said they were "pretty wrong" on the

social and economic implications.

"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 told CBA

Chief Executive Matt Comyn in an interview.

"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.

"People are like 'oh you could have saved the world a lot of

fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom' but at the time I

was like 'I see this is a real risk we should probably talk

about it' and it still may."

Altman did not cite any jobs numbers on Tuesday but has

previously talked about potential industry-wide job cuts due to

AI's advancement.

A growing number of global companies, including HSBC ( HSBC )

, Amazon ( AMZN ), Standard Chartered ( SCBFF ) and CBA

have announced some jobs within their companies were

being replaced by AI.

OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file for a U.S.

initial public offering in the coming weeks, Reuters reported

last week, citing a source familiar with the matter. The company

could be aiming for a $1 trillion valuation and raising at least

$60 billion, Reuters reported in October.

'HUMAN PART' OF EMPLOYMENT IRREPLACEABLE

Altman said he had realised that even though AI was taking

on an increasingly active role in many industries and jobs,

there was still a 'human part' of employment that could not be

replaced.

He said he had been using AI to respond to Slack and email

messages but had reverted to answering some himself.

"I had it reply to messages, saying 'this is Sam's AI' and

it was an amazing example to me of we really do care about

people," he said.

"We really do care about our interactions with people and

this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something

that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon."

That realisation, he said, had made him believe the human

interaction required in many jobs would not be replaced by AI.

"It really, in both positive and negative ways, updated me

to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different

than we thought," he said.

"I don't think we're going to have the kind of jobs

apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or

talk about."

(Reporting by Scott Murdoch; Editing by Muralikumar

Anantharaman)