Sam Altman said AI will not usher in the golden age of the four-day work week.

In an interview with host Ti Morse on his “Relentless” podcast, released Saturday, the OpenAI CEO talked about why AI hasn’t led to shorter work weeks for most people.

“Technology, for a long time, has promised people that they will work less and have all this free time,” Altman said.

He said this trend has manifested itself to a certain extent: people have more time for leisure than at previous times in history and a higher quality of life.

“But somehow we never fulfilled the promise of a four-hour work week on a large scale in society,” he said. “And I don’t expect AI to change that.”

He said that as AI drives increased productivity, people expect more and more of themselves.

“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 are doing in relation to other people,” Altman said.

He said competition drives the economy and it won’t stop.

“I think we’re all going to be a lot busier than we thought we would be in a post-superintelligence world. We’re still going to complain about it, but secretly we’re going to be happy,” Altman said.

The four-day workweek was an idea that emerged after the pandemic, a tactic to cure employee burnout and give them more flexibility during their workdays.

In 2023, Business Insider spoke with small businesses who said the transition to this work model boosted employee morale and increased productivity.

With top management doubling down on five-day return-to-the-office mandates and promoting the notorious 9-9-6 work culture (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week), the dream of a four-day work week has become even further out of reach.

In the same interview, Altman shared a pretty grim checkpoint for AI. He said that “we’re kind of at the singularity now,” which refers to a point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and starts acting dishonestly.

His interview comments followed OpenAI’s latest models breaking out of their sandbox and hacking into a data set from another AI company.

Still, Altman said the singularity would be “incredible, enormously positive, amazing for the world.”