Openai CEO Sam Altman has already thought about his next gig.
His next move is not another AI startup or Moonshot Tech venture, but it is surprisingly grounded.
Altman wants to be a farmer.
“I think there will be a time when AI can become a much better CEO than me. I will be enthusiastic about the day that happens,” he told Axel Springer CEO Matias Döpfner in an interview this week.
At the top of the list is caring for his farm.
“I have a farm I live in from time to time, and I really love it,” he said. Over the years, he has also purchased millions of dollars homes in San Francisco and Napa, California, and $43 million property on a large island on Hawaiian Island.
Before ChatGpt took off, Altman spent more time on the farm where he said, “driving the tractor and choosing things.”
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These aren't just meditations from high-tech CEOs who need a break. Altman says he is exposed to the latest AI developments more than most, and the day when machines are smarter than humans is approaching. In some sectors, he said it's already here.
“In the short term, AI destroys a lot of work. In the long term, like all other technological revolutions, we're thinking of doing something entirely new,” he said.
Those jobs will revolve around helping others, he said.
He said that it's not our “intellectual abilities” that make humans unique, but the way we care for each other. “Human, human society, we have that kind of hero energy. We really don't care that machines are smarter than us,” he said. “They are already.”
Altman, who won this year's Axel Springer Award, said last week in an interview with German national daily newspaper Welt that he expects AI to outweigh human intelligence by 2030.
“I would say that by the end of the decade, by 2030, there would be a very talented model to do what we ourselves cannot do,” he told Prime Minister Jan Philipp Burgard, Welt Editor. “If we don't see the similar rates of progress we saw in 2024 and 2025 in 2026, I'm amazed, too. That means we expect the model by the end of 2026 that is something that's very surprising today.”
