Commerce Sec. Lutnick and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman participate in a fireside chat — 9/2/2026

First of all, thank you very much for having me. As you said, this is greatest countries in the world, and it's a great honor to get to address all of you at the same time. I was always an AI nerd. I was like a real sci-fi nerd as a kid. I thought AI was the coolest thing. I always wanted to work on it. I never really thought I'd actually get to do it. I kind of can't believe this happened to me, but I always thought it was awesome. I went to school to study it at the time. Nothing was working, and I kind of gave up on it, and I went on this side quest of entrepreneurship, which was also great. Then in 2012, everything changed. None of us paid enough attention, but there was a real watershed moment where all of a sudden deep learning started to work and it got better with more compute. I paid a lot of attention to that for the next couple of years. By the time 2015 rolled around, I was like, "Hey, this is really going to happen. We've got to try this. It could be like the most important thing ever." So, we thought for a while about what to do and started OpenAI.

At the very end of 2015 we announced it, and then the first day of work was like January of 2016.

So, we knew that there was this magic piece of technology. We knew that we could apply compute to a problem and to learn it, and we knew that the more compute we used, the smarter and more capable the system got. We didn't really know anything else. We didn't know what kind of system we were going to build. This is way before the idea of language models. We were trying to train a robot hand to do a Rubik's Cube. We were trying to show that we could play video games. We were really developing the algorithms and trying to understand how this amazing property of the universe worked. Then, not until about 2018 did we start making progress on unsupervised learning and then the first GPT-1 model. Not until 2020 did we train GPT-3, which was the first model that I think actually was over some threshold of usability. Even then, most people in the world looked at this and said, "Okay, the model can generate a coherent sentence." That was really the limit at the time. Kind of impressive, but like what is this going to mean, and why is this going to matter to the economy or society or anything else? But we had discovered by this point the scaling laws, which said if we could apply like a trillion dollars of compute to this idea, something quite amazing would happen. People said, "Well, you can't apply a trillion dollars of compute, so it doesn't matter." We sort of said, "Why not? Let's try."

Different people at OpenAI would give you different answers to this, but I would say the consensus, to the degree there is one, was the time of GPT-4. This was March of 2023, but I may be wrong on the timeline there. We had that model for maybe eight months before it launched, so we had had time internally to really get to know it. That was the time where people—even some of the people internally who had been skeptics of this approach—looked at it and said, "This is going to go very far." It hasn't been that long since that moment, you know, three and a half years now. The fact that we now have a system—and we're launching our new model soon, which is another step forward, and there are many more steps forward coming soon after that—that is so capable that it is discovering new knowledge, doing science, able to add huge economic value, create entire pieces of complex software, this is a very crazy moment. I think it hit us over a period of time, but centered around this GPT-4 period.

I don't want to overstate things, but I'm very excited about our new model, so forgive me if I get a little bit too enthusiastic here. I think this, for example, will be the greatest boom in entrepreneurship and the creation and development of small businesses the world has ever seen. If you have a great idea, but you didn't have the resources or the ability to get enough capital together, or hire enough experts to work on it, or to figure out what it's going to take to invent a new piece of science or manage a complex supply chain, you can do that with AI now. I remember after ChatGPT launched, one of the stories that has stuck with me the most from that moment was a guy that managed a laundromat. Apparently, laundromats are huge businesses—wouldn't have been obvious to me, but apparently they are. This one was not going well, and he was using ChatGPT for everything: to make his marketing materials, to give him advice on legal contracts, to manage relationships with vendors—this long list of stuff. He was really the first person I met that had figured out how to use AI to effectively run a business. This was amazing to me at the time. Now, I know you all have heard stories about this a bunch and it's no longer surprising, but in 2023, the fact that someone was using ChatGPT, broken and embarrassing though it was at the time, to let them manage a business that otherwise they couldn't have done was quite remarkable. In 2025, we saw a real acceleration of this with coding agents and white-collar work agents. I think we'll see a third thing soon where we'll have these long-term persistent agents that can work like a real virtual collaborator constantly helping. But it's amazing to me what is happening with the boom in entrepreneurship and business creation because of AI. If I were a country, many of you are going to take very different approaches to how you regulate AI, how you welcome it into your country, how you use it. But for sure, I think it is non-negotiable that you have to use it. The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country is too high to ignore. There will be different ways people try to do this, but this is like the smartest people in the world decided to move to your country, to learn your language, to work very hard on whatever problem you'd like, to go discover new things that you need, and you can put as much of this to work as you want. Some of you will choose to build data centers. Some of you will choose to rent data centers from other people because you don't want them in your country. I think all that's fine. But we want to help. We want to support—not just our company, our whole industry—to bring this incredible magic of intelligence in a bottle, education in a bottle, to all of you. I think this is an incredible moment for the world: what people can do with this, the economic boom that will come with it, the individual increased quality of life. People talk about medical care and what that means, education and what that means, services that only very rich people used to have access to now anybody can have with AI. The ability for people to just come up with ideas and get them to fruition so quickly is going to be incredible.

That's not going to come from us, and I don't think that should. We will provide this engine, this incredible commodity of AI that you can use for whatever you want. But the people of the world—and I have complete trust in the people of the world's creativity and ambition—will have to figure out what to ask it to do, what ideas to throw this at, what problems and what context in a particular society or company is important to understand. So that won't be our role; I don't think we'd be good at it even if it were. But we will be able to enable everyone around the world to bring that context and those questions and those ideas.

I am always tempted to say this time is different, this is really special. To zoom out even further than that, as a kid, my understanding of the world was that there were these few punctuated moments in history, each of which was a very different thing. You had the Agricultural Revolution, and then you had the Industrial Revolution, and then you had the Computer Revolution. These were all completely different, unrelated things, and there were not that many lessons to learn from them, and they were best understood in isolation. Even if you zoomed into one, pick the Industrial Revolution, the right way to understand that was 20 or 30 important pieces of technology that were all developed over a period of a couple hundred years that came together in this important way. As an adult, I look at it as a single revolution, a single exponential of technology. Each generation has built on the scaffolding of the generations before, put a new brick in place. People have been able to climb a layer of scaffolding, to stick with the analogy, and see a little higher and do the new thing. If you think about what it took to get us to this point where we can build AI, it was all of those previous revolutions stacked together. It was collective discovery of science throughout society and the global economy that we all contribute to that made this incredible thing possible and now happen. It is tempting, whenever you're in the moment, to say, "This is the last revolution. This is the biggest revolution." There will be more after this. There will be bigger things after this. People will use AI to invent whatever thing that comes next; it's probably very difficult for us to imagine right now. I think the right answer is to look at the history of technology as one continuous exponential, the history of the economy and society as one continuous exponential. I really mean that: it's not just the technology, it's this social fabric and the kind of complex structure of the world that allows this technology to flourish and people to figure out what to do with it. You have to embrace it continuously all the way through. If you miss out on any part of it, you're not ready for the next thing that will come. If you don't enable your people and your businesses with AI, they will not invent the next level of the scaffolding. But there will be more things, and while it is tempting to say this one is different—and it clearly is really important—I would view it as a continuum.