In His Own Words — Sam Altman
Just a Good Guy
May 2015: text to Elon Musk: Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing AI. If it’s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.
December 2015: OpenAI mission statement: OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
March 2017: OpenAI is structured as a nonprofit because we don’t ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders. The only people we want to be accountable to is humanity as a whole… That’s why we’re a nonprofit.
May 2019: We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue.
Donald Trump
June 2016: Trump’s casual racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories are without precedent among major presidential nominees.
October 2016: Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to America….His racist, isolationist policies would divide our country, and American innovation would suffer. But the man himself is even more dangerous than his policies. He’s erratic, abusive, and prone to fits of rage.
January 2025: Watching [Trump] more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him…I’m not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!
Kissing A..
January 2023: tweet to Shivon Zillis, mother of four of Elon Musk’s children: BTW, good idea me to tweet something nice about Elon? Have been meaning to do this after he Dmd about not being in the photo from the first day of OpenAI. Just about how much I and others look up to him, how critical his early contributions to OpenAI are, etc.
February 2023: text to Elon Musk: you’re my hero….I am incredibly thankful for everything you’ve done to help—I don’t think openai would have happened without you.
A Stressed-Out Saint
May 2023: I have no equity in OpenAI . . . I’m doing this because I love it.
April 2026: I’m sure, like, being President of the United States would be a much more stressful job, but of all the jobs that I think I could reasonably do, this is the most stressful one I can imagine.
The Apocalypse
June 2015: I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world.
October 2023: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
October 2016: I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.
April 2026: I’m very suspicious of powerful autocrats telling a story of fear to gang up on the weak.
The Savior
June 2023: [This] is the most exciting, most promising, coolest thing I think that humanity will have yet built. We can cure all diseases, we can get everybody a great education, better health care, massively increase productivity, huge scientific discovery, all of these wonderful things and we want to make sure that people get that benefit, and that benefit is distributed equitably.
July 2023: In a well functioning society, governments would be doing the AGI project and [nuclear] fusion and a whole bunch of things — and yet they’re not. So we either sit around and watch the gradual decline of state capacity and say ‘that’s a bummer’ and we’re just not going to have any more technical progress . . . or you do the next best thing and just build great companies.
October 2023: I think AGI will be the best tool humanity has yet created. With it, we will be able to solve all sorts of problems. We’ll be able to express ourselves in new creative ways. We’ll make just incredible things for each other, for ourselves, for the world, for kind of this unfolding human story.
September 2024: astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen.
November 2024: the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential. In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.
AGI is Here
September 2024: It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.
November 2024: Interviewer: “what’s to come [in 2025]?” Altman: AGI Yeah. Excited for that.
January 2025: We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.
August 2025: GPT-3 sort of felt to me like talking to a high school student… 4 felt like you’re kind of talking to a college student. GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert.
Bubble Bailout
February 2018: If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, ‘Oh it’s great. We’re totally crushing it,’ and that’s almost never true.
August 2025: Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money, we don’t know who, and a lot of people are going to make a phenomenal amount of money.
November 2025: When something gets sufficiently huge…the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we’ve seen in various financial crises…given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, sort of, I do expect the government ends up as like the insurer of last resort.
May 2025: Congressional testimony: [The future of AGI] can be almost unimaginably bright, but only if we take concrete steps to ensure that an American-led version of AI, built on democratic values like freedom and transparency, prevails over an authoritarian one.
Words to Live By
April 2026: If you just do the naïve thing and say, “Never say anything that you’re not a hundred per cent sure about,” … it won’t have the magic that people like so much.
Credit: ChatGPT