Crocodile tears? Altman’s post “Thanking programmers” sparks ridicule; netizens: “Because of you, programmers will lose their jobs and go dig coal.”
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If you have recently seen the sweeping “mass layoffs news” shaking the tech industry: Amazon slashing 16,000 employees, Block (formerly Square) letting go nearly half its workforce, Atlassian trimming 10% of its staff, and rumors that Meta is preparing another round of major layoffs… almost all for the same reason— AI.
At a moment when tech workers are shivering and huddling together for warmth, OpenAI’s CEO, the most popular man in Silicon Valley right now—Sam Altman—suddenly decided to take a “heartwarming route” on the X social platform.
The result? Unsurprisingly, he crashed—and crashed spectacularly.
A Thank You Speech Like an “Old Dial-Up Phone”
This Tuesday, Altman posted the following, full of deep emotion, on X:
“I am filled with gratitude for those who painstakingly built extremely complex software, character by character. It's hard to recall now just how much effort it required. Thank you—it is you who brought us to where we are today.”
Sounds moving, doesn’t it? A tech bigwig remembering where his water comes from, paying homage to the old generation of programmers.
But the issue is, these sweet words sound especially jarring in today’s context. Altman’s company is precisely the one leading the AI wave, and that wave is now being used as the perfect excuse by major companies to lay off developers and cut junior programmer jobs.
The dream of computer science has now turned into a nightmare. The notion that “programming equals prosperity” has officially been shattered. According to a New York Times article citing recent research by the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the unemployment rate for recent American computer science graduates is as high as 6.1% to 7.5%—more than double that of biology and art history graduates.
The ultimate dark joke: OpenAI’s super models were trained using the massive amounts of code written by these programmers “character by character,” in old-fashioned ways.
As netizens put it, Altman’s words seem to imply: The truly skilled techniques developers once mastered are now like old dial-up phones—nostalgic, but outdated and useless.
Comment Section Highlights: Top-Tier Internet Sarcasm
Faced with this “eat with the bowl, then smash the pot” remark, X’s netizens exploded instantly. Some directly vented their anger: “You're welcome. Glad to know our reward is losing our livelihood.”
But most internet fun-lovers chose their specialty: hardcore mockery.
To let everyone feel just how intense it was, here are some top-voted replies “screenshotted” from thousands of comments on X:
[Worker Breakdown Group] Netizen @lonelyguyse1 left an era-defining tear: “So real… The first time I installed Vim, I spent a whole hour figuring out how to quit—with no internet.”
Then a netizen immediately sent a hellish blessing:
“Dear developers, you will lose your jobs forever and be forced to work in coal mines. But rest easy, for Sam Altman is grateful to you. ❤️”
[See Through the Capitalist Essence Group] Netizen @theliamnissan sharply translated Altman’s underlying message:
“Thank you for your work. Now it belongs to me.”
Another netizen @shahyn_kamali spotted a great business opportunity:
“Billion-dollar app idea: develop an AI that reads a billionaire’s post before they publish, then warns them ‘this message makes you look extremely out of touch—are you sure you want to send it?’”
[Dark Joke Group] Someone commented: “This is Sam writing an obituary for software engineers.” Another said: “This reads like what the Mayans would tell their sacrificial victims before the ritual began.”
Another netizen went for a “reverse gratitude” angle:
“I am grateful for all AI work done by OpenAI, because now I can use open-source AI models from China for free.”
Peeling Back the Jokes—What Was Lost Behind the AI Stampede?
Of course, among all the memes and jokes, there are also cool-headed thoughts from a professional perspective. This is the core worth paying attention to in this “group ridicule incident.”
Netizen @NyxCyphers gave a deep and technically solid comment:
“This gratitude is well deserved. But the unsettling part is: that ‘character-by-character’ discipline produces code that humans can audit line by line. Now, massive AI-generated code erases this. We trade artisan-level understanding for (development) speed, yet no one calculates exactly what we’re losing.”
This may be the deeper reason for the anger: not just the lack of apology to those whose data, articles, and code were stolen (as netizen @EnmiloX questioned), but also the fact that the technological surge is destroying a controllable, fully human-led engineering culture.
Interestingly, in the comment section of this fiasco, there’s a massive “cyber-rights army.” Tons of users are using the #keep4o and #BringBack4o hashtags.
Netizen @Aclle12 angrily posted: “Don’t just thank the past while erasing the future we truly love. 4o is what gave OpenAI its current status—give it back to us!”
And another netizen said: I am deeply grateful#GPT4o, it has the ability to listen with emotional intelligence—while most people still seem afraid of listening to their own hearts. How I long for a world full of compassion and humanity.
Another netizen @langrisser4o also felt the irony: “Expressing such deep gratitude to code-writing engineers, yet showing no recognition for the millions of ordinary users who tested, iterated, provided feedback, and helped popularize these models.”
From the perspective of technical development, Altman may truly be lamenting the ever-changing tide of tech progress; but from the perspective of industry practitioners, in this grand AI-led “graduation season,” the bigwig’s sentiment feels somewhat like “crocodile tears.”
In an era where programmers are using AI to help write code, yet worrying about being replaced by AI tomorrow, perhaps only this netizen’s soul-searching question truly speaks for everyone:
“You’re working so hard to replace all of us—why does anyone still like this post?”
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