OpenAI CEO Sam Altman used a recent podcast appearance to walk back some of his earlier predictions about how quickly AI would transform the economy, describing current adoption as still at the "Palm Pilot stage."
Speaking with podcaster David Senra in an interview posted Sunday, Altman said, "We have all of the technological pieces, but we have not had the iPhone moment of like completely changing how someone interfaces with technology."
Altman blamed the slower pace largely on human habits rather than any shortfall in the technology itself. "The economy just has so much inertia," he said. "People keep doing the same things they're doing. They keep buying from the same company... I think that means we've all been too ambitious on timelines, even with this incredible technology."
He pointed to the launch of GPT-4 in 2023 as the moment he expected far more software businesses to become, in his words, "up for grabs." But that shift has yet to materialise anywhere near as quickly as he anticipated.
Altman compared the current AI transition to consumers continuing to rent movies from Blockbuster even after Netflix had already launched its DVD-by-mail service. "It was amazing to me that people still went to Blockbuster," he said, adding that changing established behaviour "is much harder than the tech nerds realise."
He even admitted that he is guilty of the same thing, noting that he still manually works through his email inbox despite OpenAI's Codex being capable of handling more of that work. Still, Altman sees the delay as a net positive, arguing that it gives the transition room to happen "smoother and slower," something he said he is grateful for.
He also acknowledged that the AI industry has struggled to build public trust and explain the technology clearly. "We have not as a field done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated," he said.
Altman's caution appears limited to how quickly AI is being adopted, rather than how quickly demand for the infrastructure behind it is growing. He described compute as OpenAI's biggest bottleneck and said the company shelved its Sora video model largely because it was consuming too much processing capacity.
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Altman's comments come as other AI leaders continue to make much more aggressive predictions about the technology's impact. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, for example, has said AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.
