People

Sam Altman

OpenAI

Capability 5Outlook 3

Tracked since Week 36, last spoke Oct 6.

Where they stand

Against all 17 people scored in Week 40. Bars count people at each score; black is Altman, the dashed line is the average.

What they've said

• Tuesday, Oct 6Week 41

  Sharing OpenAI's release of hundreds of math results from an unreleased internal model, Altman wrote on X: We are entering a new era of discovery.

  OpenAI published on GitHub results for 372 problems from a set of about 4,000, produced by an unreleased model and many of them checked with the Lean proof assistant. Altman's post framed the release as the start of AI-driven discovery. Not all of the results have been peer reviewed.

  Details and sources

  The X post itself could not be opened; the wording is confirmed by The Hans India. Its timestamp, decoded from the post ID, is 6:06 PM Mountain on Oct 6, so it is filed under Tuesday even though most coverage ran on Wednesday.

  The Hans India
• Monday, Oct 5Week 41

  In an interview with Fortune, Altman said We have not solved alignment and that Given everything happening with safety, this right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.

  The interview with Fortune's Alyson Shontell was published on Oct 5 and was held at OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters. He tied the delay of an OpenAI IPO to safety concerns, and described a recent Hugging Face hack with Okay, we're in a different league now. The article also reports his view that humans can stay in control of AI, including superintelligent AI.

  Details and sources

  Fortune does not state the day the interview was recorded, so it is dated by publication (Oct 5, 3:00 AM ET); it may have been said slightly earlier. An aggregator also credits Altman with telling Politico The world should accept some bad things happening (dated Oct 4); the underlying post could not be opened, so it is not included.

  Fortune
• Week 40Sept 28 to Oct 4

  Posted that ascribing religious force to AI models is a real safety issue, in a veiled reply to Anthropic.

  On October 3 Altman posted on X: I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue. Coverage ties it to a New York Times report that Anthropic's Chris Olah has met religious leaders about model consciousness and morals. An Anthropic spokesperson said the talks were not about giving Claude religious authority. The post is a safety argument aimed at a rival rather than a change in his own forecast, so scores hold at 5 and 3. OpenAI's president Greg Brockman signed the accord on the company's behalf; Altman himself is not quoted on it in anything we could verify.

  Sources

  Sources

  • Sam Altman warns against treating AI as a religious forceStoryboard18, Oct 3
• Week 39Sept 21 to Sept 27

  Told the Security Council the world could lose control of the future to AI, and rejected both doomerism and blind optimism.

  Same room, same day, and his language sharpened too: We could lose control of the future to AI, and we should not train models that we cannot make an extremely strong case that we will be able to keep under human control. He named recursive self-improvement directly and said the pace of progress could accelerate rapidly. His line We have unilaterally slowed down in the past. We will do so in the future was vindicated by his own company three days later, when OpenAI paused frontier training for the second time.

  Outlook holds at 3 because he went out of his way to refuse both poles, naming the trap of doomerism and the trap of blind optimism and framing a two-path crossroads rather than a prediction. He asked the Council for international standards on the same stage where the US delegation rejected exactly that, hours later.

  UN Security Council, September 23. OpenAI published his remarks.

  Sources

  Sources

  • Sam Altman's remarks to the UN Security CouncilOpenAI, Sept 23
  • Security Council meeting 10228, official transcriptUnited Nations, Sept 23