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Sam Altman quote, Feb 9, 2025

CEO, OpenAI · Feb 9, 2025 · Post, Three Observations

AGI will be the biggest lever ever on human willfulness, and enable individual people to have more impact than ever before, not less.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Sam Altman

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I do not think it is right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.Apr 10, 2026· Post
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My personal takeaway from the last several years, and take on why there has been so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field, comes down to this: “Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.”Apr 10, 2026· Post
The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.Apr 10, 2026· Post
The only solution I can come up with is to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring.Apr 10, 2026· Post
As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right.Sep 23, 2025· Post
Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.Sep 23, 2025· Post
Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. Or with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to provide customized tutoring to every student on earth.Sep 23, 2025· Post
2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same. 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights.Jun 10, 2025· Post
As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity.Jun 10, 2025· Post
If we can do a decade’s worth of research in a year, or a month, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.Jun 10, 2025· Post
In some big sense, ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived.Jun 10, 2025· Post
Of course this isn’t the same thing as an AI system completely autonomously updating its own code, but nevertheless this is a larval version of recursive self-improvement.Jun 10, 2025· Post
OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.Jun 10, 2025· Post
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.Jun 10, 2025· Post
There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before.Jun 10, 2025· Post
This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.Jun 10, 2025· Post
We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.Jun 10, 2025· Post
Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshall the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025; everyone should have access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine.Feb 9, 2025· Post
The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.Feb 9, 2025· Post
In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.Feb 9, 2025· Post
In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention.Feb 9, 2025· Post
The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.Feb 9, 2025· Post
The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.Feb 9, 2025· Post
We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.Jan 6, 2025· Post
Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.Jan 5, 2025· Post
Quote
In fact, the new GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 are already enough for transformative impact in large sections of the economy and they can reliably do weeks worth of human work when properly guided and harnessed.Ethan MollickSep 18, 2026· Post
Making great things with AI means knowing which AI outputs to keep, which to discard, and which to use as raw material for something the AI would never have generated on its own.Ethan MollickSep 18, 2026· Post
My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood.Ethan MollickSep 18, 2026· Post
The capability overhang, the gap between what these models can do and what almost anyone is doing with them, is an opportunity because most people don't bring their own advantages to AI, and those who do get much more out of it.Ethan MollickSep 18, 2026· Post
You are not trying to compete with AI in producing outputs, that is a losing game. Instead, you want to use your human advantages as basis of working with AI to do things that neither of you could do alone.Ethan MollickSep 18, 2026· Post
Cognitive offloading is a strategic delegation that costs nothing. Cognitive surrender is something different; an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself. And there is something about AI, about its allure and potency, that could make surrender far more widespread.Azeem AzharSep 17, 2026· Post
About this quote
Said by
Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI
Where
Three Observations
Topics
AGI, Work
Company
OpenAI
Source
blog.samaltman.com/three-observations

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