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SA Sam Altman Sam Altman Entrepreneur and investor who has served as CEO of OpenAI since 2019, leading the company behind ChatGPT and its research on artificial general intelligence.

“I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history, to varying degrees, of course. … I don't think any of us should want to be locked into one model, one AI's or one person's or one company's moral worldview.”

Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Startups & Venture · July 2026

“I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history, to varying degrees, of course. … I don't think any of us should want to be locked into one model, one AI's or one person's or one company's moral worldview.” — Sam Altman, Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Context

Altman says AI could either spread power more widely or concentrate it more than ever before. He argues startups are the natural counterweight and that labs should hold back from imposing their own worldview.

Transcript

Y Combinator Startup Podcast Around 24:59 into the episode
Sam Altman

…in a small number of models or companies, but diffused throughout the economy so people can defend themselves. Like, you know, it's really important that people, human values are guiding these systems every step of the way. Yeah, I think we're like in the real, the real deal phase of this.

Garry Tan

…like how you've been thinking about both concentration, but also thinking of open AI as a utility, which is actually a really important message because not everyone out there is saying that message. Like, you know, there's, yeah, there's a lot to be worried about in terms of concentration of power.

Sam Altman

…power we've ever seen. And I can also imagine worlds where AI concentrates power to a degree we have never seen. And one company or person or model having more power than everybody or everything else on earth put together, whatever the sci-fi stories have said, I think that's terrible and would really, you know, maybe we would get some short-term safety benefit from that, but long-term disaster. I don't think any of us should want to be locked into one model, one AI's or one person's or one company's moral worldview. I think startups have a very important role to play here. One way that that happens is too much economic concentration in one company or one AI model. And I think startups, because of the things we talked about earlier, will be naturally very well suited to make sure that this is widely distributed. But we want to enable as many startups, as many companies, many people as possible. And that…

Garry Tan

One of the things is, this is a room full of people who will do really amazing things. They're often right at the beginning of their career, and they might look at AI safety or concentration of power and say, well, I can't really do it. That must be something the labs have to do. There is something…

Sam Altman

I mean, you can help on the concentration of power issues simply by starting a successful startup. If that's the only thing you do, and the economy keeps working in the kind of magic of capitalism and having this ecosystem that works together continuing, that alone would be a huge contribution. But…

Garry Tan

I guess I would be remiss in asking, you know, what alpha leak can you give us about what's the latest about what, you know, how much more awesome are the models going to be to the extent you can say.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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