About Sam Altman
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been active in public appearances discussing AI's societal impact, infrastructure buildout, and the approach of superintelligence. At the groundbreaking for a new data center called "The Barn" in Saline Township, Michigan, Altman described the project as a "huge bet" and said he hoped it would become a model for how data centers and communities can mutually benefit. He stated that the site could help cure diseases and provide tutoring to millions of students, and emphasized the importance of not increasing energy prices and creating union jobs. In media interviews, Altman said people are "right to be anxious" about AI, calling it "one of the biggest" technological shifts, and acknowledged that the industry has failed to articulate how people will stay in control. He also said he believes AI will treat most diseases by 2035 and expressed concern about AI's impact on mental health.
Altman has also discussed OpenAI's policy blueprint for preparing society for superintelligence, which he described as urgent and intended to start a debate. He stated that the government should be doing AI research and making longevity treatments available, and that his single biggest contribution has been pushing for AI to be a "democratized technology." Altman announced that the OpenAI Foundation is pledging $100 million to Alzheimer's research, and he participated in the Breakthrough Prize ceremony presenting an award to the Muon g-2 collaborations. He also spoke about the need for "proof of human" systems to verify identity in an age of AI-generated content, and reiterated his view that the most important priorities are accelerating research and the economy.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Sam Altman's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:02
What are the different ways you think AGI might go wrong that concern you? You said that a little bit of fear is very appropriate here. He's been very transparent about being mostly excited but also scared.
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Sam Altman0:20
I think it's weird when people think it's like a big dunk that I say I'm a little bit afraid. And I think it'd be crazy not to be a little bit afraid. And I empathize with people who are a lot afraid.
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Interviewer0:29
What do you think about that moment of a system becoming super intelligent? Do you think you would know?
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Sam Altman0:36
The current worries that I have are that they're going to be disinformation problems or economic shocks or something else at a level far beyond anything we're prepared for. And that doesn't require super intelligence, that doesn't require a super deep alignment problem in the machine waking up and trying to deceive us. And I don't think that gets enough attention. I mean, it's starting to get more, I guess.
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Interviewer1:12
So these systems deployed at scale can shift the winds of geopolitics and so on. How would we know if on Twitter we were mostly having LLMs direct whatever's flowing through that hive mind? Yeah, on Twitter and then perhaps beyond, and then as on Twitter, so everywhere else eventually. Yeah, how would we know?
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Sam Altman1:37
My statement is we wouldn't. And that's a real danger.
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Interviewer1:41
How do you prevent that danger?
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Sam Altman1:43
I think there's a lot of things you can try. But at this point, it is a certainty there are soon going to be a lot of capable open source LLMs with very few to no safety controls on them. And so you can try with regulatory approaches, you can try with using more powerful AIs to detect this stuff happening. I'd like us to start trying a lot of things very soon.
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Interviewer2:11
How do you, under this pressure that there's going to be a lot of open source, there's going to be a lot of large language models, under this pressure, how do you continue prioritizing safety versus? I mean, there's several pressures. So one of them is a market-driven pressure from other companies, Google, Apple, Meta, and smaller companies. How do you resist the pressure from that, or how do you navigate that pressure?
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Sam Altman2:40
You stick with what you believe and you stick to your mission. You know, I'm sure people will get ahead of us in all sorts of ways and take shortcuts we're not going to take. And we just aren't going to do that.
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Interviewer2:52
How do you compete with them?
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Sam Altman2:54
I think there's going to be many AGIs in the world, so we don't have to out-compete everyone. We're going to contribute one, other people are going to contribute some. I think multiple AGIs in the world with some differences in how they're built and what they do and what they're focused on, I think that's good. We have a very unusual structure, so we don't have this incentive to capture unlimited value. I worry about the people who do, but you know, hopefully it's all going to work out. But we're a weird organization. We're good at resisting pressure. Like we have been a misunderstood and badly mocked organization for a long time. When we started and we announced the org at the end of 2015 and said we're going to work on AGI, people thought we were batshit insane. You know, I remember at the time, an eminent AI scientist at a large industrial AI lab was DMing individual reporters being like, 'You know, these people aren't very good and it's ridiculous to talk about AGI, and I can't believe you're giving them the time of day.' And that was the level of pettiness and rancor in the field at a new group of people saying we're going to try to build AGI. So OpenAI and DeepMind were a small collection of folks who were brave enough to talk about AGI in the face of mockery. We don't get mocked as much now.
