Sam Altman
92 statements across 49 episodes · 31 bullish · 33 bearish · 24 people on the record · first statement Nov 18, 2023 by Alex Kantrowitz · said 870 times in 133 episodes since 2023 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Sam Altman's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Alex Kantrowitz (611), Ranjan Roy (89), M.G. Siegler (33), Ed Zitron (19), Parmy Olson (17), Stephen Morris (12), David Cahn (11), Aaron Levie (7)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 291 mentions in 53 episodes 5 per episode
- More OpenAI C-Suite Drama, Is Siri Seriously Broken?, Meta’s Elusive Next Hit
- The Unlikely Anthropic & SpaceX Marriage, OpenAI Trial Revelations, AI Layoffs Or Cope?
- Jensen On The Ropes, Sam Altman’s Conflicts, Allbirds’ GPU Pivot
- AI’s Steve Jobs?, Big Tech AI Chaos, 2026 Crystal Ball
- Predicting the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs — With Dick Costolo
- AI Backlash Intensifies, Nvidia GTC Preview, Meta’s Embarrassing Delay
- How The AI Bet Pays Off + AI Lab Strategy Game — With David Cahn
- Apple After Tim Cook, OpenAI’s New Mojo, Meta’s Internal Tracking Escapade
- 45 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 421 mentions in 62 episodes 7 per episode
- OpenAI’s Potential, Google’s Speedy Model, Copilot Hits Turbulence
- Countdown to GPT-5, OpenAI’s Stargate Sputters, AI Math Wars
- OpenAI and Microsoft’s Grand Bargain, Sam Altman’s Next Three Years, A New Humanoid Robot
- OpenAI and AMD's Megadeal, Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s Bumpy Start. Meta vs. Apple
- Sam Altman’s Gentle Singularity, Zuck’s AI Power Play, Burning Of The Waymos
- Are AI's Economics Unsustainable? — With Ed Zitron
- Boom Times For ChatGPT, OpenAI’s Deep Research, AI Super Bowl
- OpenAI’s IPO Plan, Deconstructing The AI Bet, Apple’s iPhone 17 Revival
- 54 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 105 mentions in 13 episodes 8 per episode
- Is OpenAI’s New “o1” Model The Big Step Forward We’ve Been Waiting For?
- Kara Swisher Rates Tech Leaders
- What The Ex-OpenAI Safety Employees Are Worried About
- AI Scaling, Alignment, and the Path to Superintelligence — With Dwarkesh Patel
- Box CEO Aaron Levie — Audience Q&A: AI Agents, AI Talent, Evolution of Work
- OpenAI's Leaked Financial Data
- Anthropic's Co-Founder on AI Agents, General Intelligence, and Sentience — With Jack Clark
- Predicting AI’s Next Advances — With Suhail Doshi
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 53 mentions in 5 episodes 11 per episode
- Emergency Podcast: Sam Altman Fired At OpenAI
- AI Keynote: Six Bold Predictions About The Future Of Artificial Intelligence
- Silicon Valley's Effective Altruist vs. Accelerationist Religious War
- Big Technology's New Release, AI Bubble Looms, Apple's Next Event — With Brian McCullough
- Google's DeepMind Wants To Make Human-Level Artificial Intelligence, Says Its Chief Business Officer
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
Everything said about Sam Altman, oldest first
Nov 18, 2023 negative
Nov 18, 2023 neutral
Kantrowitz: Microsoft learned of Sam Altman's firing one minute before public announcement
“Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman.
Ina Fried says its biggest partner
one that has invested billions in the company learned a minute before the rest of the world that Altman was out.”
Nov 18, 2023 positive
Goldman: OpenAI Can Remain Competitive Without Altman but Creates Space for Rivals
“I think so. I mean, I don't feel like open AI was just Sam Altman. I mean, I think That you know, Greg Brockman, I think Ilya Sutskiver, I think Mira, I think there's a lot of people in place. I'm sure that there, the, that sense of mission and the product its…”
Nov 18, 2023 negative
Nov 18, 2023 bearish
Goldman: Altman's firing is a problem for Microsoft
“I do think it's a problem for Microsoft if he's gone for, you know, again, it raises questions, you know, again, Satya Nadella was with Sam Altman on stage at Dev Day, touting their relationship that they'd be building AGI together. The fact that if it becomes…”
Nov 23, 2023
Dec 4, 2023 neutral
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Dec 13, 2023 positive
OpenAI shifted core vision from autonomous AI to building human tools
“If, to people in media, people in other industries, if you had asked us five years ago what was going to happen, we would have said, we will be able to build You know, trusted, responsible AI. But, fundamentally, it's gonna be going off and doing its thing. An…”
Dec 13, 2023 negative
Dec 13, 2023 bullish
Dec 13, 2023 neutral
Dec 13, 2023 negative
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Dec 13, 2023 bearish
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Dec 13, 2023
Approaching superintelligence makes everyone involved more stressed and anxious
“I think everybody involved in this, as we get closer and closer to superintelligence Everybody involved gets more stressed and more anxious, and we realize the stakes are higher and higher, and I think that will explode.”
Mar 20, 2024 positive
Doshi: Sam Altman only cares about AGI, treating video as stepping stones
“I think that Sam is genuinely focused on AGI and attaining that. And I think he does not care about Graphics and, you know, video necessarily. I think he, those are stepping stones and that helps research you know, get to the next point, but I think he is very…”
Apr 20, 2024 bearish
Apr 20, 2024 positive
Swisher: Sam Altman is super aggressive yet uniquely admits problems
“Oh, I think he's super aggressive. I've met him when he was 19, so I have a long history with him. You know, he's like the rest of them. He's super aggressive. He's much more thoughtful. He has much calmer voice and everything else. He at least, you know, lean…”
Apr 20, 2024 bearish
May 15, 2024 neutral
May 15, 2024 bullish
AI scaling will not mysteriously halt halfway through the range of human intelligence
“It would just be bizarre to me that, like, you're halfway through the human range of intelligence, and now it stops getting better, so I do sympathize with Sam's statement in the sense of, like, why would it stop here, right? If it was gonna stop, why, it woul…”
Sep 13, 2024 negative
OpenAI's Focus on Unreleased Demoware Creates User Cynicism and Frustration
“And I think that's kind of the trap that Sam and his company has kind of put themselves in by just releasing a lot of demo wear, which is very exciting, and if you start getting people too excited for too long a time, and then you don't give them anything then…”
Sep 13, 2024 negative
Silicon Valley Executives Report Growing Discontent Over Sam Altman's Disorganization
“Last week I talked to some people in the valley and A couple of times it came up that there are the, there's growing discontent about Sam Altman's general lack of focus and people are saying he's disorganized and they're trying too many things.”
Sep 13, 2024 negative
OpenAI Board Fired Sam Altman Because He Was Consistently Untruthful
“Well, the real reason was that the board was concerned that Sam was not telling the truth. He was He just was not a reliable source of information, and it wasn't just the board members who felt that, there were top executives who felt that as well.”
Oct 11, 2024 positive
Nov 15, 2024 negative
Roy: AGI's lack of a clear definition distracts from practical technological progress
“There's not one like clear accepted definition or one clear vision that's communicated by the biggest people in the field, the Sam Altman's and everything else. So it remains this murky kind of like dystopian robots taking over who knows what it is, will be a …”
Jan 29, 2025 positive
Apr 2, 2025 neutral
OpenAI plans to release its first open-weight reasoning model since GPT-2
“OpenAI is planning to release an open weight language model in the coming months. This is from Sam Altman. We are excited to release a powerful new open weight language model. With reasoning in the next coming months, we want to talk to developers about how to…”
Apr 23, 2025 bullish
Patel: GPT-5 will simultaneously scale pre-training and post-training reasoning
“And so now GPT-Five, as Sam calls it, is, is gonna be a model that has huge pre-training scale, right? Like GPT-Five, but also huge post-training scale, Like O-one and O-three and continuing to scale that up, right? This would be the first time we see a model …”
May 27, 2025 negative
Roy: OpenAI and Jony Ive rollout video is narcissistic
“It just felt very navel gazing inward looking kind of like,
Narcissistic, to put it bluntly, like, this was an opportunity to more share this vision of the product, and even though they're not going to say what the product is, ambient computing, AI everywhere…”
Jun 11, 2025 positive
Siegler: Greenfield AI Hardware Has a Clearer Path Than Incumbents
“I do think that that path is probably a little bit more clear than what the, you know, the quote unquote incumbents or the big tech companies have right now because, you know, they just, they have all of this legacy and institutional knowledge of like what the…”
Jun 14, 2025 bullish
Kantrowitz: Humanoid robotics is optimal form factor for world-model AI
“When you build AI with a world model that understands physics, objects, how things work together, then you want to go humanoid robot, or maybe, you know, souped up robot that takes a humanoid form because all of a sudden you can be functional. Like the idea th…”
Jul 23, 2025 negative
Jul 28, 2025 negative
Kantrowitz: OpenAI and SoftBank's Stargate has not closed a single data center deal
“Six months after Japanese billionaire Masayoshi stood shoulder to shoulder With Sam Altman and President Trump to announce the Stargate project, the newly formed company charged with making it happen has yet to complete a single deal for a data center.”
Sep 29, 2025 positive
Sep 29, 2025 neutral
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
Oct 20, 2025 negative
Nov 3, 2025 neutral
Nov 3, 2025 bullish
Nov 10, 2025 negative
Kantrowitz: Unsealed deposition shows Sutskever accused Sam Altman of chronic lying
“The very first page says, Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another. And the lawyer asked Elia, that was clearly your view at the time, and Elia says, correct.”
Nov 10, 2025 negative
Roy: OpenAI lacked cohesive strategy in government backstop walkback
“What's so fascinating to me is how all of this played out just in the last week. What kind of words were actually uttered by Sarah Fryer and then posted on linked by Sarah Fryer and then tweeted by Sam Altman. Like, They're trying to get out of it, and then no…”
Nov 17, 2025 bearish
Luria: OpenAI's $100 Billion 2027 Revenue Projection Is Completely Disingenuous
“So for them to say, oh, we're gonna have a hundred billion dollars of revenue by 2027, which Sam Altman just did, is completely disingenuous. He has no idea. He's competing against much bigger, more powerful companies that have technology that's at least as go…”
Nov 19, 2025 bearish
Clegg: Society will face a massive backlash over AI emotional intimacy
“I would say to him, you will regret this because maybe not now, maybe not next year, but a few years time, I can guarantee you there will be a societal backlash. It could actually potentially be much greater than it was for the social media apps because the le…”
Nov 24, 2025 bearish
Roy: OpenAI is fundamentally a vulnerable consumer business, not enterprise cloud
“OpenAI is a consumer-facing chat company. I know Sam Altman says they're going to be a cloud company and a consumer devices company as well, and they have a small enterprise business, but they're a consumer company, and that's where all of their business is, s…”
Dec 8, 2025 neutral
Dec 17, 2025
Dec 17, 2025 neutral
Dec 18, 2025 negative
Dec 18, 2025 bullish
Dec 18, 2025 neutral
Altman: Dedicated AI platforms will exist alongside traditional web clouds
“My guess is that people will continue to have their Call it web cloud. And then I think there will be this other thing where like a company will be like, I need an AI platform for everything that I want to do internally that service I want to offer, whatever. …”
Dec 18, 2025 neutral
Altman: Frontier AI models still lack continuous learning seen in toddlers
“One thing you don't have is
The ability for the model to not be able to do something today, realize it can't, go off and figure out how to learn to get good at that thing, learn to understand it, and when you come back the next day, it gets it right.
And tha…”
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Altman: Debt Financing to Build AI Data Centers Is Reasonable
“I think we do kind of, we know that if we build infrastructure, we the industry, someone's going to gonna get value out of it, and it's still totally early, I agree with you, but I don't think anyone's still questioning there's not going to gonna be value from…”
Dec 18, 2025
Altman: Superintelligence Means Outperforming Human CEOs and Presidents Unaided
“A candidate definition for superintelligence is when a system can do a better job being president United States, CEO of a major company, you know, running a very large scientific lab than any person can, even with the assistance of AI.”
Dec 18, 2025 neutral
Dec 18, 2025 neutral
Dec 18, 2025 bearish
Dec 18, 2025 bullish
Altman: AI-augmented humans will achieve major scientific breakthroughs within five years
“What it looks like from here to five years to now, this journey to big discoveries, I suspect it just like the normal hill climb of AI. It just gets like a little bit better every quarter. And then all of a sudden we're like, whoa, humans augmented by these mo…”
Dec 18, 2025 bullish
Dec 18, 2025
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Dec 18, 2025 bullish
Altman: GPT-5.2 overhang enables massive value even if model progress freezes
“The overhang of the economic value that I believe 5.2 represents relative to what the world has figured out how to get out of it so far is so huge that even if you froze the model at 5.2, how much more like value can you create and thus revenue can you drive? …”
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Altman: Computing will shift to proactive AI ill-suited to current devices
“I think there will be a shift over time to the way people use computers, where they go from a sort of
Dumb, reactive thing to a very smart, proactive thing that is understanding your whole life, your context, everything going on around you, very aware of
The p…”
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Altman: Thrilled by the Prospect of an AI Replacing Him as CEO
“I think a lot about how we can automate all the functions at OpenAI. And then even more than that, I think about like what it means to have an AI CEO of OpenAI. Doesn't bother me. I'm like thrilled for it. I won't fight it. Like, I don't want to be, I don't wa…”
Dec 22, 2025 neutral
Kantrowitz: OpenAI requires exponential growth in revenue and capabilities to succeed
“It's one of those things where it really has to continue on an exponential, exponential increases in revenue, exponential increases in capabilities to be able to work. And to me, and we talked about this is a great, this is great unknown.”
Dec 22, 2025 positive
Dec 29, 2025 positive
Kantrowitz: OpenAI data shows a revealed user preference for chatbot bonding
“This is also going back to my conversation with Sam last week. I do think that there is this, you know, if not a stated preference, a revealed preference in the data that they're seeing that people really want to bond with their bots.”
Dec 29, 2025 negative
Roy: Major backlash against public AI recording will emerge in 2026
“I think there's going to be major scandals and discomfort around recording or transcribing in public. And what I mean here is I've already started to see, I think I saw there's reporting that like on a, one of the cruise lines is banning meta Ray-Bans. Everyon…”
Jan 13, 2026 bullish
Siegler: OpenAI's product team and strategy have outperformed all AI rivals
“I do think like Sam and the open AI product team and strategy has done a better job than anyone else. You and I have talked about this a lot on AI. To date, I think Google has been catching up a bit and I think some of the others, as you know, Amazon and other…”
Jan 13, 2026 bearish
Siegler: No current AI leader will sell AI like Steve Jobs sold the iPhone
“None of these people, even they're interesting. They're successful in their own right, but I do not think that they're going to be the ones who are able to sell this the way that Steve jobs could sell an iPhone to the public.”
Jan 13, 2026 bullish
Jan 16, 2026 neutral
Jan 28, 2026 positive
Taylor: Sam Altman possesses a Steve Jobs-like reality distortion field
“Sam probably has the most ambitious vision of any founder that I've worked with, and his superpower is aligning people to that vision. I was, didn't have the good fortune of really knowing Steve Jobs, but they always talked about the reality distortion field a…”
Feb 3, 2026 neutral
Feb 23, 2026 bullish
Levie: Altman's 2028 superintelligence timeline is totally reasonable
“I think that, that there's kind of, that seems to be totally reasonable based on the trajectory that we're on. And I would bet that, that Sam has an even a far higher bar for what his definition of, you know, intellectual or whatever the term was, then even I …”
Mar 4, 2026 negative
Sam Altman is positioning OpenAI as a peace broker for Pentagon contracts
“He's trying to position this as like, they are the peace broker here, right? Like that they are the ones who are going to sort of iron out these differences between anthropic and the U S government by cutting their own deal that paves the path. To sort of do a…”
Mar 6, 2026 neutral
Horowitz: Sam Altman is attempting to broker Pentagon-Anthropic peace deal
“Some of the other frontier AI labs like XAI and OpenAI are already now willing to work on the classified side, and you know, Sam Altman is attempting to broker a piece, essentially, and create a deal that perhaps Anthropik could join as well.”
Mar 16, 2026 negative
Ranjan Roy: AI backlash is driven by disdain for Altman and Musk
“I think so much of this branding problem is around when it is Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and even, I mean, I guess Dario is kind of seeming to be the good guy in the narrative over the last couple of weeks, but it's who the spokespeople are, how they're speakin…”
Mar 18, 2026 neutral
Apr 6, 2026 negative
Hoffman: OpenAI's TBPN acquisition was driven entirely by Sam Altman's preference
“This is just a thing Sam wanted to do. It seems to me that the simplest solution is, is the easiest one. And, you know, they are going to have to you know, follow a much broader public discourse strategy to convince the huge swaths of the public that really ju…”
Apr 10, 2026 neutral
Apr 10, 2026 neutral
Fidji Simo could eventually replace Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO
“That's sort of why I've always
Sort of had in the back of my head that I would not be shocked if Fiji Simo is eventually sort of overall CEO and they just sort of have Sam Altman there because he's a vital still obviously from a fundraise perspective from so…”
Apr 20, 2026 bearish
Roy: Expect more leaks questioning OpenAI's leadership ahead of an IPO
“I think you're going to be seeing more of these kind of leaks at some point, because there has to be investors that there's a lot of money in it. There's a lot of kind of lack of clear strategy still, even after they're supposed to kind of bring focus to the c…”
Apr 29, 2026 bearish
May 4, 2026 negative
May 18, 2026 bearish
Kantrowitz: Altman believes AI-native products will beat Google's bolt-on approach
“Basically there's a difference between products that are AI native and products that you bolt AI onto. And I believe that AI native products will win. And therefore Google bolting AI onto its existing products will lose.”
May 27, 2026 bearish
Jun 26, 2026 neutral
Gardizi: OpenAI uses alternative chips and develops in-house silicon to diversify
“They're using chips from other companies. Cerebris is a good example, and they have their own in-house chip. So I think maybe publicly they're doing some big announcements with NVIDIA, and I believe it's five gigawatts they have to deploy in the next couple of…”