Sam Altman at Express Adda Live Updates: OpenAI CEO on AGI race, Musk rivalry, job losses, and Silicon Valley talent wars

Sam Altman at Express Adda Today Live Updates: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director of The Indian Express Group, at Express Adda in New Delhi on Friday, February 20. During the hour-long conversation, Altman touched on the rapid pace of technological advancements, talent wars in Silicon Valley, intensifying competition, the race to AGI/ASI, AI’s impact on society, and his views on peers and contemporaries in the AI industry. The session saw Altman engage with the audience with light humour as he discussed various aspects of AI development. During the conversation, he said, “AI has gone from being able to do high school math to pushing the edge of human knowledge.” Altman said the impact of AI on jobs is hard to predict. “I love to read the history of technology. People panicked about jobs during the Industrial Revolution, and they were shockingly wrong. The change won’t be as fast as some people in society predict. But eventually people will find new things to do,” he said. Altman is arguably one of the most influential technology leaders today, having helped usher in a new digital revolution and offered the world a glimpse of what the future might look like. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), a state of technological maturity in which machines become capable of performing every task that a human being can, with greater precision, efficiency, and speed. The Adda with Altman comes in the backdrop of the global AI Impact Summit 2026, which Altman is in town to attend. Hosted by India at Bharat Mandapam from February 16 to 20, the Summit has seen participation from heads of states, government officials, policymakers, tech industry executives, AI developers, researchers, and several others from around the globe. Follow our live blog for real-time updates and top quotes from the conversation with Sam Altman as it unfolds. "Governments should focus on regulating for potentially catastrophic issues of AI and be lenient on lesser important issues until we have more clarity." "I would never ask ChatGPT how to be happy. For things like therapy and life advice, it can be good but not for life philosophy." "ASI is a few years away, AGI feels pretty close at this point. If you had asked most people 6 years ago, what if we had systems that could do new research on their own, or programme on their own, you would say that sounds pretty intelligent and pretty general." "There will be some people who fall in love with AI, a small percentage of the world. A lot of breathless articles will be written about the end of society. But for almost everyone, human connection will be one of the most valuable commodity" "Elon Musk is extremely good at physical engineering and getting people to perform incredibly well at their jobs." "We were a non-profit, so to be on the board you had to be disinterested. I had a successful career and didn't care either way. At this point, I feel tired of the conversation and am not sure what to do." "We are a research first company. Making a product is a result of doing good research. Research continues to decide what models are capable of." "Increasingly, people are using fear of AI going wrong to justify the surveillance state, and they haven't thought about the downsides." "We used to do evaporative cooling in data centres, but ChatGPT queries taking up gallons of water is fake. What is fair though is the energy consumption not per query but in total and we need to move to solar, nuclear energy quickly." "Demis and entire team started working on AI before anyone else in the modern era with a lot of conviction. Wouldn't be here without their inspiration. I also admire Google's relentless focus on scaling and executing their models after being pretty far behind." "You have to give the internet something to laugh at. It is a weirdly small world, but it is very competitive commercially. Almost all the efforts that have advanced models feel the gravity of what is happening and are willing to get safety and alignment right. Don't have more to add," says Altman. "The world is at its best when there is balance of power, where all countries keep each other in check. You don't want one AI incharge of the world, no matter who has it. You can imagine a world where AI massively concentrates power, where a country can use AI to amass power and wealth." "The other extreme is everyone on Earth has superintelligence with no rules and its chaos. I personally think there will be democratization of AI, it is possible to put AI in everyone's hands while having guardrails." "China is ahead in robotics, electric motors, and magnets as well as energy build out. There are places where we are ahead of them. It is hard to be ahead on everything. Maybe if you had superintelligence you could do it. There's always ways in which global economy is competition. Reality is messier. I do think its important to look at net differences in power and the impact that it could have." "The tech industry started out with a libertarian view. That's changed significantly with AI due to the scale of the infrastructure that happens. The Trump administration has had some criticism of tech, but cooperation between tech companies and government will become extremely important in the future," says Altman. "We are not there yet. There will come a time when space will be great for a lot of things, but orbital data centres won't happen in the next decade": Altman "A question I love to ask people is how many GPUs would you like to work for you at any given time. People give different answers, no one says less than one. If you multiply that out, we have no way to deliver trillion GPUs. It points to the level of ambition we need to have on how much compute to build out. We will have robots help us figure it out." There are important advantages in vertical integration. PM Modi is certainly motivated to play on all these levels, says Altman. "I love to read the history of technology. People panicked about jobs during the Industrial Revolution and they were shockingly wrong. The change won't be as fast as some people in society predict. But eventually people will find new things to do," Altman says. "My comment few years ago got taken out of context. It's even more true now that you can make a frontier model for $10 million. The small, narrow models India is doing is incredible. I was at IIT Delhi this morning, the energy was awesome. "A year ago, AI was able to just do high-school math and people couldn't believe it. A couple of years before that AI couldn't do grade-school math. Last week, researchers put out first proof and our latest AI got seven of those problems right. Its also happened in physics. It is an amazing change in a year" India is fast emerging as one of the top countries with the most advanced users of ChatGPT. OpenAI, under a new public data initiative called OpenAI Signals, revealed that users in India are relying on ChatGPT not just for casual queries but increasingly for coding, data analysis, learning, and work-related tasks, etc. And all of this, often at rates far above global averages. Read the full report here. In his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the AI Impact Summit on Thursday, the OpenAI chief said, “Centralisation of this [AI] technology in one company or country could lead to ruin. The desirable future a couple of decades from now has got to look like a world of liberty, democracy, widespread flourishing, and an increase in human agency." “We believe that AI resilience is a core safety strategy," he added. Altman further stressed that building aligned systems remains essential. “No AI lab, no AI system can deliver a good future on its own.” “The future of AI is not going to unfold exactly like anyone predicts, and we believe that many people need to have a stake in shaping the outcome," he said, adding that it is important to be humble about not knowing everything, and that best guesses could go wrong. “Most of the important discoveries happen when technology and society meet, sometimes have some friction, and co-evolve,” Altman said. The Express Adda with Altman on Friday comes a day after OpenAI joined several leading international and domestic AI companies in pledging to evaluate multilingual AI models for global context for democratising AI access, and to enhance analysis regarding global Al adoption for economic purposes, as per the New Delhi Frontier AI Impact Commitments framework. Expanding its local presence in India, OpenAI has announced that it has plans to open new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru later this year, alongside its existing setup in New Delhi. The move is expected to enable the AI startup to better serve users in the country, which is one of its top growth markets after the United States. In the backdrop of the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, OpenAI launched a major initiative called 'OpenAI For India. The ChatGPT-maker also announced a key AI infrastructure-related partnership with IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to harness local AI data centre facilities in the country. At an event on Thursday, when asked what was the thinking behind the decision to say ‘now in India’, Altman said that the sheer scale and the deep partnership with India make everything worth it. The Microsoft-backed AI startup has also unveiled collaborations with Indian companies such as MakeMyTrip and JioHotstar. Altman is in town to participate in the global AI Impact Summit 2026 hosted by India at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. Speaking at an OpenAI event held on the sidelines of the Summit on Thursday, Altman shared that 10 years ago, AI could, for the first time, add two large numbers, and that was considered incredible. “Two years ago, AI could do high school math, sort of, and not very well. As of last week, AI can do original research-level mathematics, figuring out problems that are not yet known. This is a crazy difference, and the crazier thing is that it’s exponential,” Altman said. On Friday, Sam Altman, the 40-year-old CEO of OpenAI, who is here for the AI Impact Summit, will be the guest at the Express Adda. He will be in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group. Altman is arguably one of the most important tech leaders in the world right now, four years after OpenAI triggered a global AI arms race with the debut of an AI chatbot called ChatGPT more than three years ago.