Sam Altman on Power Lunch
Exclusive Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from the company’s Stargate campus. 6/1/26
The candid correction that AI outperforms professionals only on small tasks is the clearest value here. Otherwise, the always-on assistants, compute demand, coding gains, job anxiety, and international-risk themes substantially repeat stronger appearances in the corpus.
But to your point, we obviously don't know the answer. I mean, when you introduced, I think it was 5.2. You said it outperforms professionals across 44 occupations. You can understand why there may be an AI backlash when people hear things like that. Totally. What I wish we had said then is that it outperforms professionals at small tasks in 44 occupations, which is, I think, a more accurate thing. And it is the people that are using these that are now seeing, you know, incredible productivity growth, wage growth, all of the benefits from this. But I think people are right to be anxious. And I understand it. You know, this is like a, this is not even a technological shift that happens every generation. This is one of the big ones,
Sam Altman defends OpenAI's large compute buildout by pointing to rapidly increasing demand, especially from coding tools and future always-on AI systems. He also addresses job anxiety and global competition, emphasizing that AI should keep people in control and that major safety risks should not be treated as a race.