Sam Altman: near-term superintelligence is possible, not certain

‘I did not think we were gonna be on … a short-term trajectory of super intelligence a year ago’

EXCERPT

ALTMAN: "Mm-hmm. You brought up recursive self-improvement. I'm glad you did. Uh, people are talking about RSI a lot in San Francisco right now. Um, there was a note you sent to employees, um, that leaked when you guys filed for the IPO where you said that the faster the potential RSI takeoff looks like it could be, the more it could be advan- advantageous to delay an IPO. Yeah. What did you mean by that? Um, I think it's a difficult transition to become a public company. Um, you know, people respond to incentives and they want their stock price to go up and they don't wanna miss a quarter, whatever else. I never want us... I want it to be as easy as possible for us to make a decision in the interest of safety of the world. Um, and if it's like, "Hey, we're gonna have to stop training or stop deploying or whatever, and we're gonna like, you know, there's gonna be a big revenue slowdown in the short term," it'd be nice not to have a newly public company and that pressure at the same time. Now, I did not think we were gonna be on a kind of like, you know, like a short-term trajectory of super intelligence a year ago. Now I think it may happen. Um, I'm not confident it's gonna happen. It's just like we're making extremely fast progress, and I, you know, I think our mission is way more important than being a public company on any particular timeframe. Um, so we'll make the best decision for the mission"

Source: Sources Podcast · Sep 1, 2026 · 74s clip