OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has admitted that he was wrong about how quickly AI would change business and the economy. In an interview with podcaster David Senra, Altman said he expected much more disruption after the launch of GPT 4 in 2023. He believed software companies would face major changes. However, Altman admitted that the pace of change is slower because businesses and society have a natural resistance to sudden changes.
Altman said he expected the arrival of GPT 4 to create much more disruption in the software industry. “I thought when we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, that very quickly after that there was going to be much more disruption, software businesses up for grabs right away, than it turned out to be,” he said.
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OpenAI CEO believes the slower pace is primarily because of the way the economy works. Businesses often take time to change their systems. “I think I was wrong about a few things, but one in terms of the speed: the economy just has so much inertia,” he added.
In the interview, Altman also talked about OpenAI’s efforts to build Codex, its coding-focused product. He said that the company initially faced a difficult challenge because Anthropic’s Claude Code had already gained strong momentum.
Altman said, “We were way behind Claude Code, and it seemed like a kind of crazy kamikaze mission to try to beat them with a coding app.”
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He said the usual business advice would have been to avoid competing with a product that was already ahead. “The consensus is that this kind of thing never works, and you just move on to the next one. It’s a fool’s errand to try to win when someone else already has momentum in a particular product category,” he stated.
Despite the early gap, Altman said Codex has since become widely used by some of the best programmers he knows.
Speaking at the podcast, Altman also said he is worried AI being controlled by a handful of companies, models or people one day. “The right approach is to say we want people deeply in control of the future,” he said. “Society and the models are going to co-evolve.”