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Sam Altman quote, Feb 9, 2025

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

The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.

Primary source

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

More from Sam Altman

Quote
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
It is important that the democratic process remains more powerful than companies.Apr 10, 2026· Post
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
AGI will be the biggest lever ever on human willfulness, and enable individual people to have more impact than ever before, not less.Feb 9, 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 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

On the same topics

Quote
An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute.Tyler CowenSep 22, 2026· Post
A world with sufficient compute is one where intelligence is a commodity, and in commodity markets margin comes from a superior cost structure, which I would expect the leading model providers to have, in part because they have a meaningful lead in scaling and can apply superior AI to their infrastructure.Ben ThompsonSep 21, 2026· Post
About this quote
Said by
Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI
Where
Three Observations
Topics
Compute, Research
Company
OpenAI
Source
blog.samaltman.com/three-observations

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