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 don't think we have done a great job of explaining to people why we think all of the potential downside of this technology is worth it… you paint this picture of the future where it's like a new industrial evolution. And maybe the last one wasn't that good and this one sounds worse. And I will have no job, no ability to like have control or choice or freedom of my future. And AI is so dangerous that you're going to have to have a crazy surveillance stage so we don't all die… This is like a terrible sales pitch.”
Cheeky Pint · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2026
Context
John Collison asked whether training models to be good at cyberattacks was a mistake, comparing the industry to an SNL sketch: "we urge you to urge us to stop." Altman agrees the joke landed because it was true, and criticizes how the AI field has pitched its own future to the public.
Transcript
…a while, you know, pull out their gigantic Xerox Alto disk or they would like pull out their like, you know, with like line by line written of assembly or they would pull out their punch cards. And I felt like it is incredible to me that you all bootstrapped us to this point doing it this way. Yes,
…was the cyber RL a mistake? Or did we just have to go there? Because it's a little like the SNL thing of, you know, we urge you to urge us to stop. It's like the models are getting very good at cyber capabilities. Like, yeah, I mean, They are getting very good, but not just totally emergently.
…potential downside of this technology is worth it. Like the kind of caricature of this is people feel like we're like, all right, you know, fine. You say the model is going to cure cancer someday. Maybe it will. And if so, I guess that's good. And you say it's going to like make stuff cheaper. And okay, maybe I already see that's good and I get access to medical advice or legal advice. But then you paint this picture of the future where it's like a new industrial evolution. And maybe the last one wasn't that good and this one sounds worse. And I will have no job, no ability to like have control or choice or freedom of my future. And AI is so dangerous that you're going to have to have a crazy surveillance stage so we don't all die. This is like a trend. This is like a terrible sales pitch. And one of the things that I am most proud of about OpenAI is even when it has been hugely unpopular in the AI safety community for us to push for iterative deployment and putting these tools in the hands of people, we have really stuck to that principle. And I think this is the only kind of good path. I think people, it's not enough to…
Iterative deployment is this idea that you just have to get the advances out there and you can't kind of stopper them up inside.
I mean, not all. You still have to make them safe before you put them out there. You can't cause havoc in the world. But that building up a capability overhang is a thing to fight against. That directionally speaking, yes, you want to get this into the world. You want to get this into people's…
The exploits get a lot of headlines. The prevented exploits do not. How quickly are people making progress with cyber blue?
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