Sam Altman quotes on AI, with sources
CEO, OpenAI · 27 quotes · latest Apr 10, 2026
- I do not think it is right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.
- It is important that the democratic process remains more powerful than companies.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.
- 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.
- 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.
- As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity.
- 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.
- In some big sense, ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived.
- 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.
- OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.
- 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.
- 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.
- This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.
- We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.
- AGI will be the biggest lever ever on human willfulness, and enable individual people to have more impact than ever before, not less.
- 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.
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.
- In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.
- 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.
- The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
About Sam Altman
CEO, OpenAI. Listed here for public statements only; no personal details.
Photo: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Topics: Regulation, Safety, AGI, Economics, Infrastructure, Compute