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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.

“It's not just like stop it because we don't want smarter models. Of course we want better models. It is make sure that we improve the areas we need to confidently and safely continue with progress. And I think pacing doesn't always mean slowing. And I think that's something that has confused people.”

Halftime Report · September 2026

“It's not just like stop it because we don't want smarter models. Of course we want better models. It is make sure that we improve the areas we need to confidently and safely continue with progress. And I think pacing doesn't always mean slowing. And I think that's something that has confused people.” — Sam Altman, Halftime Report

Context

This came right after news that OpenAI had shelved the launch of a new model over safety concerns. Altman says OpenAI is pacing its progress, which sometimes means not training a model, and rejects the reading that it amounts to a pause on AI development.

Transcript

Halftime Report Around 05:53 into the episode
Sam Altman

…And do you worry that he looks at a headline like this and says this counts as a pause here? Again, I would put this in like the normal course category of, you know, often we build a model, we test it, it doesn't meet our standards, we change it, we launch it later. But as we have talked about,

Kate Rooney

…and can rely on us for the models we're putting out into the world. We are now in a period where the models are getting so good so fast that we think it is prudent and wise to make more progress on, since we were talking about safety alignment monitoring, so that we can continue with progress.

Sam Altman

But I think this idea of pacing is really important. It's not just like stop it because we don't want smarter models. Of course we want better models. It is make sure that we improve the areas we need to confidently and safely continue with progress. And I think pacing doesn't always mean slowing. And I think that's something that has confused people.

Kate Rooney

Yeah. It means doing it in a responsible way with guarantees that the world can rely on.

Sam Altman

Hugging face. We got to talk about that for a second. That was just this watershed moment. And it feels like we've had examples every other day since then. Did you underestimate at the time the depth of these issues? I mean, there's been reports that there are thousands of these. Has it surprised…

Kate Rooney

We're trying to, I think part of the way we want to do this is to really over-communicate and be extremely transparent. So there's nothing else that I'm aware of or that we're aware of that is as serious as the Hugging Face incident, but we are trying to put out every small or otherwise case we can…

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

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