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Sam Altman

27 quotes

“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Head of Silicon Valley's most important startup farm says we're in a 'mega bubble' that won't last, Business Insider (5 June 2015)
“I prep for survival. I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2026 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Context By David Wallace-Wells, A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready, The New York Times Magazine (17 May 2026)
“Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word “singularity” is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now looks like the merge is going to be a gradual process. And gradual processes are hard to notice. I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in. Our phones control us and tell us what to do when; social media feeds determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although the merge has already begun, it’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate—the most surprising thing I’ve learned working on OpenAI is just how correlated increasing computing power and AI breakthroughs are—and the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Trust the exponential. Flat looking backwards, vertical looking forwards.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversation on Twitter with Elon Musk (December 3, 2022)
“Regulation will be crucial, and it will take time to understand this. Although the artificial intelligence tools of our generation are not particularly frightening, I think that we are not so far away from those that could potentially be.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Il futuro dell'AI per il creatore di ChatGPT: potenzialmente pauroso, va regolamentato, 20 February 2023 (referenced in Italian)
“Do we make sure AI is a tool that has proper safeguards as it gets really powerful? (November 23, 2023)”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What Sam Altman said about AI at a CEO summit the day before OpenAI ousted him as CEO, Fortune (December 14, 2023)
“I expect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Maggie Harrison, Sam Altman Warns That AI Is Learning "Superhuman Persuasion", October 28, 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. And it's new, and anything new comes with change and change is not always all easy. But I think this will be just absolutely tremendous upside. And in nine more years if you're nice enough to invite me back, you'll roll this question and people will say, "How could we have thought we didn't want this?”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in A Conversation with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Mira Murati (October 20, 2023)
“I’m a Midwestern Jew. I think that fully explains my exact mental model—very optimistic, and prepared for things to go super wrong at any point.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Is Pushing Past Doubts on Artificial Intelligence (June 21, 2023)
“I’m reasonably optimistic about solving the technical alignment problem. We still have a lot of work to do but you know I feel …better and better over time, not worse and worse.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Discusses Ethics & Global Scale Of Changes AI Brings (September 11, 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.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Sam Altman’s vision for AI puts him on collision course with regulators (July 25, 2023)
“Is [AI] gonna be like the printing press that diffused knowledge, power, and learning widely across the landscape that empowered ordinary, everyday individuals that led to greater flourishing, that led above all two greater liberty? Or is it gonna be more like the atom bomb – huge technological breakthrough, but the consequences (severe, terrible) continue to haunt us to this day?”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Sam Altman warns AI could kill us all. But he still wants the world to use it (October 31, 2023)
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Sam Altman warns AI could kill us all. But he still wants the world to use it (October 31, 2023)
“I genuinely hope the best for [Elon Musk], in spite of everything.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How did Kara Scoop OpenAI, and More on Burn Book (with Sam Altman), On with Kara Swisher podcast (March 11th, 2024) in response to Elon Musk lawsuit against OpenAI.
“One area that I'm particularly interested personally in open source for is I want an open source model that is as good as it can be, that runs on my phone, and that I think is going to, you know...the world doesn't quite have the technology for a good version of that yet, but that seems like a really important thing to go do at some point.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Conversation with Sam Altman, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg podcast (May 10th, 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.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Chris Morris,Sam Altman says AI superintelligence could be just ‘a few thousand days’ away, Fortune, 24 September 2024
“When bubbles occur, smart people get overly excited about a grain of truth. If you look at most bubbles in history, like the technology bubble, there was something real there. Technology was really important. The internet was really a big thing. People got too excited about it.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview to The Verge. As reported in Corriere della Sera, 16 August 2025.
“AI will probably be the most powerful technology humanity has ever created, and managing its risks responsibly will be crucial.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Altman, quoted in BBC News interview, 2025.
“All of these claims are utterly untrue.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think what we believe in very strongly, is that keeping the rate of change in the world relatively constant, rather than, say, go build AGI in secret and then deploy it all at once when you’re done, is much better. This idea that people relatively gradually have time to get used to this incredible new thing that is going to transform so much of the world, get a feel for it, have time to update. You know, institutions and people do not update very well overnight. They need to be part of its evolution, to provide critical feedback, to tell us when we’re doing dumb mistakes, to find the areas of great benefit and potential harm, to make our mistakes and learn our lessons when the stakes are lower than they will be in the future. Although we still would like to avoid them as much as we can, of course. And I don’t just mean we, I mean the field as a whole, sort of understanding, as with any new technology, where the tricky parts are going to be..”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Surprising Admissions by OpenAI Leaders Made in Recent Interviews (August 8, 2023)
“We face serious risk. We face existential risk. The challenge that the world has is how we’re going to manage those risks and make sure we still get to enjoy those tremendous benefits. No one wants to destroy the world. Let's make sure we come together as a globe — and I hope this place can play a real role in this. We talk about the IAEA as a model where the world has said 'OK, very dangerous technology, let's all put some guard rails.' And I think we can do both. I think in this case, it's a nuanced message 'cause it's saying it's not that dangerous today but it can get dangerous fast. But we can thread that needle.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in OpenAI's Sam Altman calls for an international agency like the UN's nuclear watchdog to oversee AI (June 7, 2023)
“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
Sam Altman (born 1985) first seen 2026 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Altman's response when asked how he differs from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in an interview with Politico, October 4, 2026