OpenAI’s Sam Altman Sees a Future With a Collective ‘Superintelligence’
Sam Altman recently made headlines when he said, “A kid born today will never be smarter than AI. Ever.” But there’s a second part to that thought …
The OpenAI CEO also carefully detailed the ramifications of a future with “superintelligent” AI in a mid-August interview on the YouTube channel of video journalist Cleo Abram. And one week after OpenAI launched GPT-5 on Aug. 7, Altman was speculating that children born today will also “always be used to an incredibly fast rate of things improving, and discovering new science. They will just — they will never know any other world!”
This led him to perhaps the grandest thought of all: that maybe it’s society that’s the superintelligence. “No one person could do, on their own, what they’re able to do with all the really hard work that society has done together to give you this amazing set of tools.”
And it’s the kids born today who will ultimately inherit what a superintelligent society has created for them.
So what is the sum of all technologies? If our future harnesses everything ever built, by everyone who came before us — how does it culminate?
Sam Altman has some thoughts …
AI Replaces Altman
Altman turned to examples from his own life. OpenAI does cutting-edge research into AI, but a superintelligence would just be better at it — “smarter than the whole brain trust of OpenAI.”
And it could even take his job — a superintelligence would be better at running OpenAI. “So you have something that’s better than the best researchers, better than me at this, better than other people at their jobs. That would feel like superintelligence to me.”
He acknowledged today’s systems haven’t yet matched the level of the best researchers. If it takes a top mathematician a thousand hours to prove a new theorem, “AI systems are superhuman on one-minute tasks, but a long way to go to the thousand-hour tasks. And there’s a dimension of human intelligence that seems very different than AI systems when it comes to these long-horizon tasks.
“Now, I think we will figure it out, but today it’s a real weak point.”
AI Discovering New Science?
Abram had reached out to other tech CEOs to get their questions for Altman, and Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison had asked when large language models (LLMs) would make their first significant scientific discovery — and what’s missing such that it hasn’t happened yet?
But leaving aside special cases like pure mathematics, or the protein structure research by the AlphaFold project at Google‘s DeepMind, Altman had a ready answer. While “the definition of ‘significant’ matters a lot, I would bet that by late 2027, most people agree that there has been an AI-driven significant new discovery.”
What’s missing now is “the cognitive power of these models,” but we’re seeing “steady and quantifiable improvements,” and “We have a path to get to that time horizon. We just need to keep scaling the models.”
And this led Altman to predict that by 2035, “I think we will be able to use these tools to cure a significant number — or at least treat a significant number — of diseases that currently plague us. I think that’ll be one of the most viscerally felt benefits of AI.”
He was imagining something truly world-changing. “I would like to be able to ask GPT-8 to go cure a particular cancer.” He walks through that scenario. “I would like GPT-8 to go off and think and then say, ‘Ah, OK — I read everything I could find. I have these ideas. I need you to go get a lab technician to run these nine experiments.'”
Receiving the results, GPT-8 then says, “OK, I just need one more experiment,” and after that is ready to say, “Go synthesize this molecule,” even recommending the appropriate testing on lab animals. And finally …
“Here’s how to run it through the FDA.”
Coders Wishing in Real Time
Even today, Altman said GPT-5 reminded him of the excitement of being young and discovering programming — but now wishing new features into existence in real time. “I was just like, ‘Now I want to try this! Now I have this idea!’ … But I could do it so fast, and I could express ideas and try things and play with things.
“I was worried for a second about kids missing the struggle of learning to program in this sort of stone age way. And now I’m just thrilled for them, because the way that people will be able to create with these new tools, the speed with which you can bring ideas to life … that’s pretty amazing.”
“If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history. Because there has never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new — to go invent something, to start a company, whatever it is.”
— Sam Altman
But, Abram asked, does our creative process require that struggle? Is there a danger that we lose something by using AI as “an escape hatch for thinking?”
“There are some people who are clearly using ChatGPT not to think,” Altman began. But “there are some people who are using it to think more than they ever have before.” Altman said he takes inspiration from ChatGPT’s top 5% of users. “It’s really amazing how much people are learning and doing and — you know, outputting.
“I am hopeful that we will be able to build the tool in a way that encourages more people to stretch their brain with it a little more, be able to do more. Certainly, for the people who want to use ChatGPT to increase their cognitive ‘time under tension’ — they are really able to.”
‘Mostly’ Real …
The year 2025 already saw a video going viral — of bunnies jumping on a trampoline — that turned out to be entirely AI-generated.
So in five years, how will we figure out what’s real and what’s not?
Altman first acknowledged the possibility of technical solutions like cryptographic signatures. But his sense is that the real and the AI-enhanced will “gradually converge.”
“Even a photo you take out of your iPhone today — it’s mostly real, but it’s a little not. There’s some AI thing running there in a way you don’t understand and making it look a little better. … Most people decided it’s real enough — but we’ve accepted some gradual move from when it was photons hitting the film in the camera. … And I think that the threshold for how real does it have to be, to be considered to be real, will just keep moving.”
So looking to the year 2030, Altman said, “certainly a higher percentage of media will feel not real. But I think that’s been a long-term trend anyway.”
Jobs That Go Away, Jobs That Change
Abram asked him to look ahead five years. In May, Anthropic’s CEO/co-founder famously told Axios that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Won’t that be a very different world for college graduates?
Altman paused a full five seconds before answering …
Then he said, soberly, “I think it’s totally true that some classes of jobs will totally go away.” But then he added quickly that “This always happens. And young people are the best at adapting to this.
“I’m more worried about what it means, not for the 22-year-old, but for the 62-year-old that doesn’t want to go retrain or re-skill or whatever the politicians call it.”
“If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history. Because there has never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new — to go invent something, to start a company, whatever it is.”
Later, Altman added that besides the jobs that are lost — and the jobs that “change significantly” — he also thinks new jobs will be created, jobs that hadn’t even existed before. “In some sense, this has been going on for a long time. … It’s still disruptive to individuals, but society has proven quite resilient to this.
“And then in some other sense — we have no idea how far or fast this could go.” Given that, Altman said he thought the world needs “an unusual degree of humility and openness to considering new solutions.”
A Changing Social Contract?
In a later discussion, Altman first warned he’s not an economist — and he can’t predict the future. But then he said, “It seems to me like something fundamental about the social contract may have to change.”
Maybe not — maybe capitalism continues working “as it’s been working — surprisingly well — and like, demand-supply balances do their thing, and we all just figure out kind of new jobs and new ways to transfer value to each other.” But even in that best-possible scenario, he thinks we’ll see a need to consider how we share access to “this maybe most important resource of the future.”
Abram asked a difficult question: What will all this dramatic change feel like for the great masses of people? “If this all goes the way you hope, who still gets hurt in the meantime?”
Altman paused again for several thoughtful seconds
“I don’t — I don’t really know what this is going to feel like, to live through. I think we’re in uncharted waters here.”
But Altman still has a hopeful outlook, as he believes in humanity’s adaptability and its creativity. “I think we always do figure out new things to do.” (And though dramatic change may be coming, “I don’t think it will happen as fast as some of my colleagues say the technology will. … Society has a lot of inertia. People adapt their way of living surprisingly slowly.”)
Altman predicted that in the future, AI will become so ubiquitous that it will disappear, an underlying technology that’s taken for granted. “All these companies and people and institutions before us built up this scaffolding, we added our one layer on top, and now people get to stand on top of that. … And that is the beauty of our society.”
And later, Altman adds hopefully that, “That’s been working for a long time.”
