Sam Altman at Italian Tech Week 2024 (Stefano Guidi/Getty Images)

Altman: Artificial general intelligence will arrive during Trump’s time

The OpenAI CEO admitted to moving the goalposts as to what that means, however.

1/6/25 11:58AM

In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reflected on his tumultuous leadership during the young company’s most consequential moments, and shed light on the progress of company’s quest for its Holy Grail: AGI, or artificial general intelligence.

Filling in some details of early OpenAI lore, Altman decided to release the first version of ChatGPT against the advice of his team:

“‘Why are you making us launch this? It’s a bad decision. It’s not ready.’ I don't make a lot of ‘we’re gonna do this thing’ decisions, but this was one of them.”

Altman said he told the team, “I think we have something on our hands that we do not appreciate here.”

Defining exactly what AGI means is slippery, and Altman admits to moving the goalposts.

“Can it start as a computer program and decide it wants to become a doctor? Can it do what the best people in the field can do or the 98th percentile? How autonomous is it? I don’t have deep, precise answers there yet, but if you could hire an AI as a remote employee to be a great software engineer, I think a lot of people would say, ‘OK, that’s AGI-ish.’”

Altman predicted that AGI will be achieved during the new Trump admin, and he didn’t make much of his $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inaugural committee. “He’s the president of the United States. I support any president.”

That said, he did not donate to Biden’s inauguration.

When asked about the potential risks of ChatGPT’s misuse, such as being used to develop bioweapons, Altman wants to move fast and break things:

“I can simultaneously think that these risks are real and also believe that the only way to appropriately address them is to ship product and learn.”

Altman said the company has been working hard with partners like Nvidia to secure enough GPUs for its voracious computing needs, and is working on its own chips as well.

As for powering all these energy-hungry data centers that OpenAI relies on, Altman would prefer to use nuclear fusion, which has yet to be commercialized at scale (though Altman is bullish on his fusion startup, Helion).

Altman’s recent squabbles with OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk have drawn a lot of attention, including Musk’s lawsuits seeking to block OpenAI’s restructuring to a for-profit company.

When asked about the threat of Musk’s newfound power as Trump’s adviser and buddy:

“The question was, will he abuse his political power of being co-president, or whatever he calls himself now, to mess with a business competitor? I don’t think he’ll do that. I genuinely don’t. May turn out to be proven wrong.”

Tom Jones37m

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Tesla used skewed data in push for European FSD approval, Reuters finds

Tesla has used highly questionable safety stats in an effort to win over European regulators and rekindle sales in the region, according to a Reuters investigation.

Tesla reportedly pitched regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands with claims that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech is over 7x safer than human drivers. However, independent researchers told Reuters that the stats are misleading because Tesla compares airbag-deployment crashes involving FSD-equipped vehicles with much broader US crash statistics, while also benchmarking newer Teslas against the entire US vehicle fleet, which is significantly older on average.

Despite the flawed metrics, the Dutch regulator approved FSD in April, saying its decision was based on its own “tests, analyses and verifications,” and Tesla is now pushing for EU-wide clearance. A version of FSD is currently available in five European markets.