CEO, OpenAI
Sam Altman: People are right to be anxious about AI
Sam Atlman, OpenAI CEO, joins 'Power Lunch' to discuss the pace of AI buildouts, what consumers believe around AI and much more.
About Sam Altman
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been active in public discussions about the pace of AI development and its societal implications. In a March 2024 podcast, he discussed the company's approach to iterative deployment, stating that releasing ChatGPT was a controversial decision but that he believes democratizing access to AI is important. He also said that compute will be "the currency of the future" and that he does not believe any one person should have total control over OpenAI or AGI. In a June 2026 interview, Altman said that people are "right to be anxious" about AI, describing it as "one of the biggest" technological shifts. He added that the industry has "failed to articulate" how people will remain in control of their futures. Altman has also focused on infrastructure and healthcare. In June 2026, he spoke at the groundbreaking of "The Barn," a data center in Saline Township, Michigan, describing it as a site where "cancer gets cured" and where "hundreds of millions of students" could learn. In a May 2026 interview, he said he believes AI will help treat most diseases by 2035 and that the government should be doing AI research and longevity work. He also expressed concern about AI's impact on mental health, saying he is "increasingly worried" about societal-scale behavioral changes.
Transcript (17 segments)
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Sam Altman0:00
Good. I'm really happy about this, but I think our industry underestimated how much we're going to be able to keep people at the center of everything, and an economy that is in a world that is based on people.
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Interviewer0:10
But to your point, we obviously don't know the answer. I mean, when you introduced, I think it was 5.2, you said it outperforms professionals across 44 occupations. You can understand why there may be an AI backlash when people hear things like that.
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Sam Altman0:22
Totally. What I wish we had said then is that it outperforms professionals at small tasks in 44 occupations, which is, I think, a more accurate thing. And it is the people that are using these that are now seeing, you know, incredible productivity, growth, wage growth, all of the benefits from this. But I think people are right to be anxious. And I understand it. You know, this is like a this is not even a technological shift that happens every generation. This is one of the big ones.
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Interviewer0:50
And if not one, yeah, maybe.
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Sam Altman0:52
One of the biggest. Yeah. And so it would be imprudent not to have some real caution around that.
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Interviewer0:57
Well, on that, you know, on the AI backlash, and I have been speaking to a number of the leaders in the industry who have been saying maybe we haven't done enough to articulate the benefits, which may be difficult to do, but there's not just opposition to data centers like this. There is a more significant, perhaps, opposition to what it's going to do to society. How do you feel as as the leader, one of certainly the key leaders in this in terms of your ability to combat that backlash?
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Sam Altman1:24
Yeah. So it's a huge challenge. And again, as I said, I think this is like there's something good about this. Like society should have antibodies against too rapid of change and there should like, part of the reason that we believe in this strategy of iterative deployment is we want society to see the technology. We want society to really understand what's happening and have a chance to debate, react, sort of say, hey, this doesn't make sense or this isn't going to work for me. Like, this has got to be I have no interest in like building a, you know, super smart AI that accomplishes some non-human goals. Like this has got to be about something that is working for people and that people are at the center of it. And human values are what what we drive forward. So people should react. People should say, hey, this is what I want and not this. I don't think it's about not explaining the benefits because, you know, we say AI is going to cure a bunch of diseases. And people say, okay, that's great. But like, that's not really my question. No, my question is what is my role in the future? What is my economic future? What is my agency like? How do I know that my, my kids, my family will still be able to have a fulfilling, you know, creative expression, struggle to drive the world forward, to grow, to kind of do this thing together in a way that has worked for a long time. And when you have people in AI say, well, yeah, sure, there's going to be no jobs or 50% of jobs are going to go away, or 90% of jobs are going to go away. And AI is kind of going to be smarter than you at everything. And, you know, we'll give you some basic income, but there's like, you're not really going to have a role.
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Interviewer3:01
It doesn't.
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Sam Altman3:02
That that's horrible. I mean, that is a horrible. And by the way, you know, this AI company, maybe we're going to destroy all the jobs, but we're the most valuable company in the world. People just look at you and you're like.
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Interviewer3:13
Yeah.
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Sam Altman3:13
So I think it's a terrible message. And I don't think it's that we haven't articulated the upsides. I think people actually believe us. Like, you know what? Go cure cancer. That sounds great. I think we have failed to articulate as an industry how people stay in control of determining the future at every step and have a really meaningful life in all the ways we care about.
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Interviewer3:31
Another part of it may be the pace of change itself. I mean, you're releasing a major model. What is it every six weeks or something like that? It's very hard. Things seem to be changing so quickly. You know.
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Sam Altman3:41
I maybe maybe you're right. I don't think that's I think at this point, people believe us that the models are getting smarter. And, you know, there was a time when the first iPhones came out that every iPhone released was a huge deal, and people lined up overnight and got very excited. And now I couldn't even tell you the number of the latest iPhone. It's great. It's amazing. It's my favorite piece of technology, but I expect it to continue to get better. And I know they make a new one every year. I, I kind of think the same thing for this technology, which is people expect the models to keep getting better. What they really want to know is like, what's going to happen with society.
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Interviewer4:17
Yeah. And none of us, I mean, you, you don't really have the answer. You can, you can guess.
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Sam Altman4:24
Of course, I don't have the answer entirely. But what I can say is our whole effort, our whole company, is about giving this new kind of infrastructure at massive scale to people and trusting that the democratization of power, of wealth, of opportunity, of agency will continue to do this incredible story of civilization going forward.
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Interviewer4:51
Sorry. No problem. We're trying to figure out how much time you have left with us, but we're in this race with China. At least that's the way it's described. And that is one reason why we're just full speed ahead. Don't stop. Build as many data centers as you can. Move as quickly as you can.
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Sam Altman5:05
I think in some ways that's okay. And in some ways that's really dangerous. Like I think it's fine to say, hey, we're going to win this. We're going to have, you know, most of the economic benefit. There will be some global scale safety issues. And we have had time in the past times in the past, like with the IAEA, for atomic energy and weapons, where the world comes together and says, you know, none of us should be taking global risk, different countries, different systems, they can sort of say, I'm going to treat economics this way. You're going to treat it that way. I'm going to think about using AI in health care this way. You're going to think about using it that way. But on the really big things, making sure we don't ever lose control of