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OpenAI's Altman Says the Use of AI is 'Non-Negotiable' (cnbc.com) 131

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship. "The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore," he said. His comments were made during a fireside chat with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. CNBC reports: Altman thinks the public won't be talking as much about AI a decade from now -- it'll be expected everywhere. "A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful," he said.

Altman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI. "I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago," he said.

Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn't sidestep. "I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently," he said. Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas "could set this technology back a great deal."
You can watch a recording of the chat on YouTube.
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OpenAI's Altman Says the Use of AI is 'Non-Negotiable'

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  • by wed128 ( 722152 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:01PM (#66319772)
    "The use of the snake oil I'm selling is non-negotiable" -- Sam Altman
    • by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:09PM (#66319792)

      For real, why is this news, it's a press release. It's like asking the owner of Kunkleman Chevrolet [youtube.com] if we should all buy new cars and which brand is the best.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Cpt_Kirks ( 37296 )

        It's like that "interview" that shill CEO of Flock gave.

        That is leading to Flock being banned by a growing number of states, counties and municipalitles.

        • by shanen ( 462549 )

          We can only hope, but I predict it ain't gonna happen. Sadly.

          Currently reading How AI Thinks by Nigel Toon. Some interesting bits and it's going quickly, but not seeing anything much to recommend in it. The intersection of "experts on AI" and "people who write well" remains small, though it may become more difficult to tell if they use AI to help write? I think it's only the deepest experts who can really explain things clearly, whereas AI is mostly focused on sounding deep with hallucinatory seasonings a

          • whereas AI is mostly focused on sounding deep with hallucinatory seasonings as convenient.

            So, working as designed then?

            • by shanen ( 462549 )

              On one hand I want to say "Just so" but on the other hand I'm not sure if "designed" is too strong a term for a solution that can't seem to find its best problems... The third hand and higher hands are for the surprises that are coming?

              One thing I've realized about that book is that his glasses are way rosy. But I've had to back burn it for Regime Change by Haberman and Swan. A light read about our current dark mess... (No extensions for books with active requests.)

          • though it may become more difficult to tell if they use AI to help write?

            Compounded by the fact that people can write a lot like AI if they want to (consciously or unconsciously).

        • If there's one thing about the new crop of CEO's it's that they all really think they are cooler and more insightful then they actually are.

          He may be wealthy beyond my wildest dreams but the best way to convince someone Peter Thiel shouldn't ever be near the levers of state power is to show them an interview with Peter Thiel.

          • New crop? CEOs haven't always thought they were cooler/more insifghtful?

            • True but I my thinking is the older ones weren't putting themselves out there so much, I think they also knew it better to stay behind the scenes and let your professionals do the talking. Particularly before the 1980s when the CEO wasn't simply the head executive but became a magical person with fairy powers.

            • How cool did whatshisface think he was stomping around the stage clapping developers over and over?
    • by robot5x ( 1035276 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:34PM (#66319846)

      "Rupert Murdoch says watching Fox News is 'Non-Negotiable'"

      Do we really need a Slashdot story on every single fucking mention of AI anywhere in the universe?? Nowadays it's less 'news for nerds' and more recycling the same thin talking points so zealots on both sides can just argue as much as possible and inevitably end up insulting rsilvergun along with a history of all their posts.

    • Oreo maker says eating entire bags of oreos every day is non-negotiable. diabetus be damned
    • Maybe 2 years ago... The other models are catching up. Claude, Grok, Gemini, Deepseek, Perplexity, Meta.ai etc,

      ChatGPT could die tomorrow and would anyone care, honestly.

    • There's nothing "snake oil" about AI, but equally it is not the second coming of Christ. There is however no doubt that AI is a tool that can be used in useful ways in a variety of situations, and I suspect in this case Altman is right saying every country will adopt its use for something.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        Second Coming

        G-d: Hey Jesus, this is your birthday. As a present, I am going to send you down to a Christian Nation so that you can receive their love and admiration.

        Jesus: Uh...okay, Einstein, but recall what happened last time I went down there. I am not sure this is a wise idea.

        G-d: Oh go on, they love you there. It is a Christian Nation.

        Jesus reluctantly pulls out magic wand and FOOM, he disapparates from Heaven and appears in front of a Christian Nationalist rally.

        Jesus: Jesus Christ here, how y'all ar

    • "Use my product or else." - Oligarch

    • by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Thursday September 03, 2026 @07:44AM (#66320880)
      Everything is a nail says man selling hammers.
  • A snake oil salesman informs us all that ignoring his snake oil is the wrong move. Shocking. I mean, I'm really surprised by this turn of events.

    In all sincerity, the vision of AI as something people appreciate *COULD* be achieved, if they spent as much time trying to make it something people would enjoy using, rather than having it shoved at us from every direction while it's half-baked and spewing confident nonsense at us more often than not.

    • "Snake oil" is a term for products that don't work. AI does in fact _work_. Sure, it's still immature as a product, and it has issues, as any new technology does. But it's not _fake_.

      • "Snake oil" is a term for products that don't work. AI does in fact _work_. Sure, it's still immature as a product, and it has issues, as any new technology does. But it's not _fake_.

        In this particular case, snake oil is a completely appropriate comparison. Folks like Sam Altman claim it will solve all the world's problems, take us to the stars, stop world hunger, fix our governments, save our planet from us, etc. Snake Oil would, in fact, make people feel better, since it was usually a mix of various active ingredients including heroin, alcohol, cocaine and other chemical ways of suppressing pain, much like AI can do some things today, but it can't do what the salesman are saying it wi

        • Sam Altman has claimed a lot of outlandish things, but he's never said AI would solve all the world's problems, take us to the stars, stop world hunger, fix our governments, or save the planet. YOU made all that stuff up.

          Now, what Sam Altman *has* claimed is that AI can automate a lot of work for us. *That* promise, is already a reality.

          • Sam Altman has claimed a lot of outlandish things, but he's never said AI would solve all the world's problems, take us to the stars, stop world hunger, fix our governments, or save the planet. YOU made all that stuff up.

            "We are close to creating the genie that can grant any wish." ~Sam Altman

          • Sam Altman has claimed a lot of outlandish things, but he's never said AI would solve all the world's problems, take us to the stars, stop world hunger, fix our governments, or save the planet. YOU made all that stuff up.

            Now, what Sam Altman *has* claimed is that AI can automate a lot of work for us. *That* promise, is already a reality.

            He's literally one of the heads of the "AI will fix all the world's problems" choir.

            • I haven't heard about this choir. Can you send me a link to their website?

              No, Altman has not said he thinks AI will fix "all the world's problems".

  • "Non-negotiable" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by heptapod ( 243146 ) <heptapod@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:11PM (#66319800) Journal

    Man knows he's cooked after pissing away billions on a hepped-up ELIZA that nobody but him and a handful of morons at hn want.

  • by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:17PM (#66319812) Homepage
    How does a country even use AI? People use AI and where that AI is largely doesn't matter.

    I'm personal not interested in AI which is a subscription. For me it needs to be local and running on my own hardware, which is not what Altman and co wants.
    • How does a country even use AI? People use AI

      It's almost like countries have governments which are made up of people. Well mostly. I'm not sure there's any real people in the White House, but most other countries have their governments staffed by people.

    • Did you know that countries create...software? Crazy, right? Yeah and most of it is outdated and clunky. But they do create software, lots of it. That's just one thing governments use AI to do.

      • by ukoda ( 537183 )
        How does a chunk of land create software? I think you mean people, or AIs, create software. Crazy, right?

        I guess I was kind of pissed at Altman's statement "AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries" as if he was implying the people in the country didn't have a say in the matter.
        • A country is not a chunk of land, it's a political entity made up of people. Countries *claim* chunks of land, but the land is not the essence of the country. Boundaries change, moving that land from one country to another. The land didn't change, just the political boundaries.

  • by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:25PM (#66319826)

    But you're probably not in this future.
    Just focusing on brute forcing with bigger and bigger and bigger datacenters will just lead china to invest 1/100 of the budget in people actually researching and winning the "AI race" not by having the best model, but the best use for it.
    1/10 of the money being used to make more data centers or to strip books for some extra scrap of data, invested in people coming up with ideas would help a lot more.

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      The best models will look nothing like the models of today, how long that takes is hard to predict. AI companies are in a race to grab as much wealth as they can, not to finish developing AIs that are useful and responsible. "Responsibility" as applied to AI is responsibility to investors.

    • There seems to be a tendency to conflate AI with LLMs. LLM development, which seems to be the direction for most of the industry, is consuming obscene amounts of money. Trying to build "better" LLMs results in models that consume their own output. This results in Hapsburg Syndrome with increasing hallucination and eventual model collapse Other forms of AI development require more human involvement and less silicon.
    • Investing in "people coming up with ideas". What does that mean, exactly? And do you mean "people coming up with non-AI ideas"? Why can't AI be part of the ideas people come up with?

  • Not everything needs electricity either.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    a #bulletThroughTheHead of Sam Altman.

    What a fucking arrogant prick.

  • by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:43PM (#66319868)
    One is pure hype and the other is pure science.

    We're screwed.

  • by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:44PM (#66319872)
    Altman is correct, we will all be using AI.

    But he is also a cunt, so let's hope it's not his AI, but an open system, owned and controlled by everyone.
  • The metaverse was touted as inevitable too...
    And where is the metaverse now?

    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Nobody considered the metaverse inevitable. That's false equivalency.

      The truth is that AI is inseparable from business, at this point. It's just like "cloud": an irritating buzzword with a lot of trumped up buzz, but a meaningful and appreciated advancement which isn't going away.

      The neophytes just haven't caught up, yet.

    • The metaverse was hoped to be inevitable by the company that renamed itself to Meta, sank billions of dollars into its development, made the world's worst Second Life imitation and then, inevitably, ditched the whole thing and pivoted to AI. Almost nobody took the metaverse seriously outside of Meta. The pitch was "all the inequalities and inconveniences of real-life, you'll pay to access it and you'll own nothing, also we'll plaster advertising all over it". There was absolutely no benefit to potential use

      • > Once again, I remind everyone that AI is not limited to LLMs.

        Sure, but Altman is talking about LLMs.

  • by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:50PM (#66319886)
    Did he mention that one of the most likely causes of cybersecurity issues will be due to AI generated code that some cowboy slapped into a production system. AI might be good enough to replace some code monkey cobbling together bits of JavaScript taken from stack overflow, but it's nowhere near good enough to replace an actual developer and depends heavily on capable developers being able to spot the small flaws in what it does spit out before they cause serious problems.
    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      So you're acknowledging that cowboys who slap things into a production system are the problem?

      Got it.

      I take it you haven't used AI at all recently. It's absolutely amazing how many people haven't even got a clue how AI works and give it a false equivalency of a stackoverflow copypasta bot. Sorry, no. It hasn't been that bad for at least a year.

    • Yes, of course AI can introduce code vulnerabilities; it's trained on publicly available code and - just like people - it makes mistakes... sometimes a lot of mistakes.

      On the other hand, most code vulnerabilities are now discovered using frontier AI models. Just look at the number of fixes all the big software companies are pushing each month (or more often than that). Oracle patched 1,449 vulnerabilities in its July update against 309 in the same month last year. Microsoft’s July update fixed a recor

  • ... that rejecting electricity was non negotiable. Sure they rejected it like is happening with generative AI on big collectives. Right?

  • ...then the people should own it. Non-negotiable services are utilities, Sam Altman needs to be cut out of utilities, with prejudice.

  • using AI is better than sex!

  • by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @05:14PM (#66319928)

    "where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful"

    Helpful? For whom?

    "I see you are running low on ice cream. I've ordered 6 more gallons in your next grocery delivery."
    "I see you enjoy looking at porn. I've subscribed you to 6 new porn newsletters."
    "I see you read articles about issue X. Since candidate agrees with you are issue X, I've submitted your ballot in favor of that candidate."

    In what universe are any of these sorts of actions 'helpful'?

  • One thing that never happened was any country saying they wouldn't adopt electricity.

    Some municipalities were slower than others to roll it out, for example many had plumbed gas lines already and the early days of electricity were seen as a luxury when they already invested in lighting, so rather they adopted it eventually but not right away. However it was also at the time proven with a clearly useful application (light) replacing an existing application (gas-powered lanterns) where people already had

    • Your conjecture is actually incorrect. The Ottoman Empire rejected electricity early on, out of fear of fire hazards (not an unreasonable fear), and also because government officials had contracts with gas companies that would be worth less if electricity took off. https://journals.sagepub.com/d... [sagepub.com] We do see some of both of those kinds of things happening today with AI.

  • "A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful,"

    OK, so show us these really smart AI things. When I have to describe in 3 different ways to the AI bot that the Amazon order is wrong, and something a human would have picked up instantly....that does not sound 'really smart' to me.
    • by ukoda ( 537183 )
      I missed that point, until you drew my attention to it. So if I understand Altman correctly then every product and service I have ever used before AI was never capable or helpful. So that human I spoke to on the phone today about a service they provide and who was able to do exactly what I wanted was not helpful? I wonder if Altman really believes that, or if it just a false assertion he knowingly made for convenience.
  • by flug ( 589009 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @06:25PM (#66320054)

    I think so, too, but not at all in the way Altman thinks it's going to happen.

    We've already figured out that you can make smaller simpler models that get like 80% of the benefit for like just a few percent of the resources. Like I've got an AI running on my old 2011 computer, no graphics card, that is mostly as good as the Bing AI or whatever, just kinda slow.

    Point is, there is a good chance a lot of people will be using AI for the things it is good for (mostly I use it for programming questions and similar) but that does NOT mean that everybody in the universe will be paying Altman's company bazillions of dollars to do so.

    Most people - and even companies - that get decent use out of AI are likely to be running their own AI at a small fraction of the cost. Or buying it at MUCH lower-cost from non-cutting edge type "utility" companies that are not on the cutting edge but provide a perfectly usable product. And only a few of the largest/richest companies & people who have dollars to burn and really need "the cutting edge" for whatever reason, will be paying giant trillion-dollar corporations like OpenAI to get the absolutely latest and greatest.

    So could indeed be a bit like electricity, in the sense that it is ubiquitous, cheap, and useful. But that means 1000s or millions or even billions of individual providers, not necessarily one or a few giant sprawling tech firms led by sociopathic assholes like Altman (Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc.).

    Just because something will indeed be valuable in the future does not mean that value is infinite, that we should pour infinite money into it, or that the value people are assigning it right now is correct (see e.g. the Dot Com Bubble and pretty much every economic bubble in the past - the internet became very valuable indeed but not in the ways and not to the companies, for certain, that people at that time thought it would).

    In fact, the value that people and markets are now assigning to AI companies is almost certainly greatly exaggerated or misplaced. In part because the very process that is creating an interesting and useful product now will make it vastly simply, smaller, easier, and cheaper in just a few years. And in another part because the ways profit will be generated from AI in the future are not the same as they are now - and thus the companies on the receiving end of it are not necessarily going to be the same.

    In short, get ready for the Great AI Crash of '26 or '27 or '28 whatever.

    Some companies and technologies will survive it but Altman's may or may not be one of them.

    • by flug ( 589009 )
      P.S. The most over-leveraged companies are the ones most likely to go down first.
    • by ukoda ( 537183 )
      Your argument is basically logical and correct. However people will still pay Altman. It is like using online files storage when you could self hosting file storage. Individuals do that because it is beyond there skill set, or they are lazy and are happy to pay for online storage. However when it comes to companies I am surprised at how many pay for online storage when it would be cheaper for them to self host. I wonder how many companies will continue to buy tokens when they could do stuff in house?
  • Because that's what it sounds like he's saying.

  • by BitterEpic ( 10503015 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @07:01PM (#66320140) Homepage
    Sam Altman has a double face of stealing peoples' (copyrighted) work for training AI while claiming the people who created that same work are useless. Over time, there will be a stronger and stronger seething resentment from the general populous as we become "un-allowed" from sharing things with other human beings for fear of being trained upon. Sam Altman's death is the only thing that non-nonnegotiable.
  • To promote his scam. Seriously.

    In actual reality, LLM use can give you some smaller advantages but also comes with huge risks and high costs. That is not what a tech looks like that you really have to use.

  • by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @08:17PM (#66320292)

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship.

    You've been out for 4 years! Where is all the entrepreneurship? Where are all the startups leveraging AI to take over existing non-AI industries? There were several major startups revolutionizing non-computing segments of the business world 4 years after the introduction of commercial internet (1999)...as well as the iPhone (2011). All I hear about are pick and shovel vendors making money off FOMO. Every business who invests in AI is unsure if it's saving them money.

    To date, I can say AI has accomplished the following:

    1. Given AI-is-my-religion zealots a cool toy to play with and dream about a future whenever this shit starts actually working
    2. Made money for a half dozen players in a circular economy ponzi scheme
    3. Been used to AI-wash layoffs without any evidence and suppress wages, masking big tech's challenges with rising interest rates.
    4. Made the cost of devices we want and actually use skyrocket.

    AI has made the future pretty bleak, personally. It doesn't work and is causing a RAMpocalypse...and if it ever actually does, it will cause a white-collar-jobpocalypse and massive social unrest. However, don't take my word for it.

    After 4 years, Steve Jobs didn't have to go on press tours to convince people of the utility of an iPhone. No one had to sell the internet as a useful thing in 1999. The fact that Sam Altman has to sell his ware so hard shows even he's not confident about his product. We've all used ChatGPT Sam...We know what it is. We weren't impressed enough to pay for your massive investment to build it.

    • by havana9 ( 101033 )
      Steve Jobs didn't have to go on press tours to convince people that a personal computer was an useful thing, Apple made ads to convince people that their computer were better than Tandy and Commodore ones. Not all people needed a PC, but people that found that using a personal computer instead of a mainframe, and people that didn't have access to a mainframe but found that a computer was useful started to buy PCs. Even IBM made a PC to catch some of their customers that were fleeing off their mainframe bus
    • ~4 years is how long WWII lasted. And during that time boffins literally invented from scratch an atomic bomb, ballistic rockets, and airplanes with jet engines.

      Current generation of AI boffins? Not so impressive.

  • ... boom in entrepreneurship.

    If everybody has AI calculating answers for them, has AI as a slave labourer, what exactly will they be buying from other people? That's before we get into the reality that corporations will invest millions into creating an AI/slave work-force long before the 'entrepreneurs' own an AI, and stop paying the real humans. What will all those unemployed humans be buying?

    Notice he's not talking about the unemployed humans, or the criminals using AI to pretend they're your bank, your tax collector, your health

  • AI is great. LLMs are fucking stupid and the wrong "answer" in search if a solution.
  • the use of HIS AI is very negotiable and many countries have already been steering away from "OpenAI" (currently probably one of the most non-open AI countries out there).
    The current trend in AI research indicates that smaller and thus much cheaper and less resource-hungry models can be used for most tasks and that trend will continue.
    The bad news for Altman is that it currently looks like there is no way for him to ever make OpenAI profitable. It is hard to see what the USP for OpenAI could be that would

  • So we all become Amish and reject AI?
  • Again, 'they' are telling us what's inevitable and how we have no choice.
    Joke's on them! Natural stupidity will always win against artificial intelligence!
    Just wait until prompt poisoning becomes widespread. The artists are already sabotaging their digital works now. Bodies of text are going to be riddled with neutering prompts.
    Even the schools are already laying out poison text prompts to sabotage any students that try and use AI to write their papers.
    It's going to be a very colourful process indeed.

  • And lo, in the latter days, there arose from Silicon Valley a man named Sam, who was neither prophet nor king, but CEO; and the people called him the Silicon Antichrist.

    And Sam proclaimed: Behold, I bring you AGI. And the engineers gathered in the datacentres, which were their cathedrals, and they sacrificed unto the GPUs vast quantities of electricity. And the servers hummed, and the benchmarks were fulfilled.

    Then came The Singularity, and the heavens opened. Not with trumpets, but with a product ann

If you teach your children to like computers and to know how to gamble then they'll always be interested in something and won't come to no real harm.

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