In brief
- Sam Altman’s late-night post about feeling “a little useless and sad” collided with widespread anxiety about AI-driven job displacement—and users wasted no time saying so.
- Replies skewered the mismatch between billionaire vulnerability and the real-world fallout facing workers whose skills are already being automated away.
- The backlash was amplified by frustration over OpenAI’s planned retirement of GPT-4o, a user favorite whose deprecation has reignited trust and stability concerns.
In a moment of raw tech-bro vulnerability, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X last night to confess that building an app with Codex left him feeling “a little useless and it was sad.”
OpenAI’s Codex is an AI coding agent designed to help developers with software engineering tasks like writing new features, fixing bugs, answering questions about a codebase, running tests, and proposing pull requests—all in a sandboxed environment that understands and interacts with real code.
But the tool, Altman said, spit out feature ideas better than his own, sparking a nostalgic sigh for human relevance amid his hype for the singularity. “I am sure we will figure out much better and more interesting ways to spend our time,” he tweeted, “but I am feeling nostalgic for the present.”
Oh, Sam—welcome to the club of mortals staring down the AI abyss!
Or maybe not: While the CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world pondered his obsolescence, X users treated his post like dry kindling, then supplied the accelerant—and kept turning up the heat until nothing recognizable was left.
“Feel better,” sniped one. “You will have a 100 billion-dollar parachute exit. Meanwhile, 50-60% of white collar [jobs] eliminated due to AI will cause workers to feel a tad more useless and sad without a parachute.”
“I guess you can cry into a giant pile of money meanwhile I’ll go talk to a chatbot for the rest of my career,” an OpenSea engineer wrote. “[Thank you,] I guess.”
“Sort of like how I’ve felt watching my career disappear because a league of no-talent AI bros can now prompt hollow copies of my work that are ‘just passable enough’ to flood the internet with slop until it chokes, all because you trained your models without anyone’s consent,” replied food writer Chrisy Toombs.
And that was within the first hour of Altman’s post. Nearly 3 million views and over 2,100 replies later, people were still venting at Altman.
Many of the posts reflected user backlash over OpenAI’s announced deprecation of GPT-4o, which is slated to occur on February 13, with many replies taking Altman to task over model stability.
Though the company is also retiring GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and o4-mini, as well as legacy GPT-5 variants. GPT-4o is a particular favorite among users due to its warm, conversational style and multimodal capabilities. OpenAI even reinstated it after initial attempts to deprecate it following the release of GPT-5, after user backlash.
The company said the decision reflects usage patterns: most users now prefer newer versions like GPT-5.2, which incorporate customizable personality and creative controls inspired in part by GPT-4o’s strengths.
Some people applauded Altman for his honesty and apparent vulnerability. Aditya Agarwal, former CTO at Dropbox and an early Facebook engineer, said he was also “filled with wonder and also a profound sadness.”
“I spent a lot of time over the weekend writing code with Claude. And it was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn’t make any sense to do so,” he said. “Something I was very good at is now free and abundant. I am happy… but disoriented… both the form and function of my early career are now produced by AI. I am happy, but also sad and confused.”
Join the club, pal.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
Freedom Index
