Sam Altman’s thanks to programmers attracts memes

If you need a relief from the news that Amazon has laid off 16,000 workers, Block has cut nearly half its workforce, Atlassian has cut 10% of staff, and Meta is reportedly considering another massive round of layoffs, all in the name of artificial intelligence, we invite you to browse the responses to Sam Altman’s recent post on X.

Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared this on Tuesday:

“I’m so grateful to the people who wrote a very complex program, letter by letter. It’s already hard to remember how much effort it actually took. Thank you for getting us to this point.”

The problem with this nice sentiment is that Altman introduced AI that is now being used as an excuse to lay off developers and reduce junior developer jobs. He did this by training on massive amounts of code written the old-fashioned way — by the same people he now thanks.

His post suggests that the difficult-to-master craft of developers is now like a rotary telephone: outdated and unnecessary.

Naturally, Altman’s comments attracted even richer memes and responses than his post. While some were directly angry (“You’re welcome. It’s good to know our reward is having our jobs taken away”), most of the internet did what it always does: make corny jokes.

There are thousands of comments. Some of our favorites:

“A lofty eulogy for software engineers”

“It’s times like these that I really miss Sam Altman’s parody account.”

“Dear developers, you will lose your jobs forever and have to work in coal mines, but you can rest easy knowing that Sam Altman is grateful to you. ❤️ 🙏”

“Billion Dollar App Idea: AI that reads billionaires’ tweets before they’re posted and says ‘This will make you look incredibly out of touch with reality, are you sure?’

“I feel grateful to OpenAI for doing all the AI ​​work so I can have free open source Chinese AI models to use 🙏”

“That sounds like something the Mayans would say right before a ceremony starts.”

Finally, there’s another reason to bring up this meme: