{"id":119743,"date":"2026-07-27T06:14:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T06:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/119743\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T06:14:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T06:14:12","slug":"altman-ai-wont-bring-4-hour-workweeks-because-people-are-competitive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/119743\/","title":{"rendered":"Altman: AI Won’t Bring 4-Hour Workweeks Because People Are Competitive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Altman<\/a> said AI won’t usher in the golden age of the four-day workweek.<\/p>\n

In an interview with host Ti Morse on his “Relentless” podcast, released on Saturday, the OpenAI CEO talked about why AI has not led to shorter workweeks for most people.<\/p>\n

“Technology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure,” Altman said.<\/p>\n

He said this trend has played out to some extent, with people having more time for leisure than at previous points in history and a higher quality of life.<\/p>\n

“But somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour workweek at mass scale in society,” he said. “And I don’t expect AI to change that.”<\/p>\n

He said that as AI drives productivity gains, people are increasingly expecting more of themselves.<\/p>\n

“We always want more. We think of new things to do, to create for each other, to want for ourselves. It’s like a relative game. People are very focused on how they’re doing relative to other people,” Altman said.<\/p>\n

He said that competition drives the economy and will not stop.<\/p>\n

“I think we’re all going to be much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post-superintelligence world. We’re still going to complain about it, but secretly we’re going to be happy,” Altman said.<\/p>\n

The four-day workweek was an idea that emerged post-pandemic, a tactic to cure employee burnout and give workers more flexibility over their workdays.<\/p>\n

In 2023, Business Insider spoke with small businesses<\/a> that said transitioning to this work model raised employee morale and boosted productivity.<\/p>\n

With the C-suite doubling down on five-day return-to-office mandates and promoting the notorious 9-9-6 work culture \u2014 working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week \u2014 the dream of a four-day workweek<\/a> has slipped further out of reach.<\/p>\n

In the same interview, Altman shared a rather grim checkpoint for AI. He said that “we are now, like, in the singularity<\/a>,” which refers to a point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins acting in a rogue manner. <\/p>\n

His interview comments followed OpenAI’s latest models breaking out of their sandbox and hacking into a dataset from another AI company.<\/p>\n

Still, Altman said the singularity would be “incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Altman said AI won’t usher in the golden age of the four-day workweek. In an interview with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,982,25,1329,60657,4572,4585,55973,49286,17222,572,60656,43383,3736,2073,60655],"class_list":["post-119743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-altman","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-business-insider","tag-employee-morale","tag-history","tag-interview","tag-leisure","tag-more-time","tag-openai-ceo","tag-people","tag-previous-point","tag-productivity-gain","tag-singularity","tag-week","tag-workweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}