Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is already considering his next gig.
His next step is surprisingly practical, but it’s not another AI business or a tech moonshot.
Altman wants to become a farmer.
He told Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner this week that he believes AI will one day be a far better CEO of OpenAI than he is, and he will be nothing but excited the day that happens.
Taking care of his farm comes first on the list.
He claimed to truly enjoy his farm, where he spends some of his time. In addition, he has acquired a $43 million mansion on the Big Island of Hawaii and multimillion-dollar homes in Napa and San Francisco, California, throughout the years.
Altman claimed to have spent more time on the farm before ChatGPT gained popularity, when he would “drive tractors and pick stuff,” among other things.
These are not only the thoughts of a tech CEO in need of some downtime. The day when machines surpass humans in intelligence is rapidly approaching, according to Altman, who has had more exposure to the most recent advancements in AI than others. “It’s already here in certain sectors,” he remarked.
AI will eliminate many employment in the near future. He assumed that, like every prior technological revolution, we would eventually come up with entirely new things to do.
According to him, those positions will probably include assisting people. What distinguishes us isn’t our “intellectual capacity,” he continued, but the way we care for each other. Humans, human society, have such major character energy that we don’t care if machines are wiser than us. “They already are.”
In an interview with the German national daily newspaper WELT last week, Altman, who was awarded this year’s Axel Springer Award, stated that he believes artificial intelligence would surpass human intellect by 2030.
“I’d be very surprised if we don’t have extraordinarily capable models that do things that we ourselves cannot do by the end of this decade, by 2030,” he told WELT editor in chief Jan Philipp Burgard. He would also be shocked if the pace of advancement in 2026 didn’t match that of 2024 and 2025. This implies that by the end of 2026, he would anticipate models that would be surprising if they were available now.
