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.
“There's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now, is we overreact to AI safety. And so we say, look, everyone, you're going to get a cure for cancer. You're going to have material abundance, but you will have no freedom. You will have no agency. It will be a perfect surveillance state.”
Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Startups & Venture · July 2026
Context
Garry Tan asked what a good outcome looks like ten years from now. Altman says the test is whether people have more freedom and agency each year, and names an overcorrection on safety, trading freedom for comfort, as the outcome he most wants to avoid.
Transcript
…of billions. If that happens again, which I think it probably will, then in another six and a half years, the average person uses, let's say, 500 billion tokens a month, and the token leader uses a quadrillion or quadrillions of tokens a month. And I think that will just become the expectation.
So all of these things happen. They come to pass. It's 10 years from now. What's the best version of that 10 years from now with intelligence fully on tap, super intelligence here? And we figure it out. We make it. The society makes it.
I kind of think if every year people have more freedom and agency to spend more of their time doing the stuff they want to do, and they feel like the quality of life and the quality of their time is going up year after year, we'll probably be mostly okay. We will have avoided like a crazy concentration of power or an economic collapse. We'll have necessarily avoided a huge safety incident. We'll have avoided like too much change in any one time unit. And, you know, there's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety. And so we say, look, everyone, you're going to get a cure for cancer. You're going to have material abundance, but you will have no freedom. You will have no agency. It will be a perfect surveillance state. There will be no privacy. And that's what it is. You're going to get great comfort, but you will have, there will be nothing left in the world for you to really do, nothing that really matters. You'll just kind of live at the service of the AI giving you material wealth. I'd really like to avoid that. And I think it's easy to…
Let me put you back into the sophomore year of Stanford. You're coming to YC. If you could give yourself a message in a bottle to that Sam Altman, what would you say to him right now?
I would just, it's all going to work out. Like it was, you know, it feels like such a crazy, it is a crazy and it's very stressful thing to do a startup. And, you know, my first startup didn't work out great. And it was like a sort of difficult time in my life. But it one of the things, I think…
Well, I can't think of a better way to end Startup School 2026. Sam Altman, thank you. Thank you all so much.
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