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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 would much rather intuitively have a trillion AIs of slightly superhuman intelligence join society than one AI of one trillion IQ join society.”

Cheeky Pint · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2026

“I would much rather intuitively have a trillion AIs of slightly superhuman intelligence join society than one AI of one trillion IQ join society.” — Sam Altman, Cheeky Pint

Context

Altman explains why he has become excited about swarms of AI agents. His argument is that society's robustness comes from many actors keeping each other in check, and a single all-powerful model would lose that.

Transcript

Cheeky Pint Around 21:09 into the episode
Sam Altman

…society, it is unbelievably robust. And this would not happen without a lot of people keeping each other in check and collaborating and kind of these values of pluralism and democracy. And I had been sort of sad that that was going to trend away in AI. And now I'm excited about this as a direction.

John Collison

You're saying basically it shouldn't lead in a centralized direction because you will have many agents and agents pushing against each other in a dynamic equilibrium. And offense, defense is a good example of this.

Sam Altman

I would much rather intuitively have a trillion AIs of slightly superhuman intelligence join society than one AI of one trillion IQ join society.

John Collison

Yeah. And you think we're headed in that direction of the multiple.

Sam Altman

All of these things are things we have to push for. Like all of these things are like we have this incredible technology. It can be pointed and deployed in many ways. I think there are a lot of people who may have a different opinion about how it should be used and what is the best version of the…

John Collison

Let's talk about starting a business. Thanks to coding models, your weekend side hustle can quickly become a serious undertaking. And we've been busy here at Stripe making that product. As simple as possible. Stripe Atlas helps you with everything you need to start a business, like company…

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

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