Sam Altman, in his keynote speech at the India AI Impact Summit, said that democratisation of AI is the only fair and safe path forward to ensure that humanity flourishes.

“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, he said, warning that centralising AI in one company or one country could “lead to ruin.” 

Instead, he argued that spreading control is safer than allowing one dominant authority to dictate the future. “Sharing control means accepting that some things are going to go wrong in exchange for not having one thing go mega wrong, cemented totalitarian control.” 

His second priority was resilience. Not just technical safety inside companies, but preparedness across society. “We believe that AI resilience is a core safety strategy.” He stressed that building aligned systems remains essential. But he also made it clear that responsibility can’t sit with a handful of AI labs. “No AI lab, no AI system can deliver a good future on its own.” As AI systems grow more powerful, including open-source tools that could be misused, governments and institutions will need to strengthen safeguards beyond the technology itself.

Altman said no one fully knows how AI will evolve. “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 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,” he said.

On AI changing the economics of the world

According to the CEO of OpenAI, AI will change how the global economy functions. “A really great thing about AI progress is that it looks like many things are going to get much cheaper and have much faster economic growth. We're already seeing what AI is doing for access to high-quality healthcare, education, and more.”

In the coming years, Altman expects to see robots make many products and physical goods cheaper as supply chains get automated. “The limit to how far this cost reduction can go may only be government policy. But the other side of this coin is that current jobs are going to get disrupted, as AI can do more and more of the things that drive our economy today.”

Speaking about AI and the job market, he said that technology will always disrupt jobs, and people will always “find new and better things to do.” Altman said that he was confident that AI would instead make everyone useful to each other. “I'm confident we will keep being driven to be useful to each other, to express our creativity, to gain status, to compete, and much more, but the specifics of what we do day to day will probably look very different. Each generation has built on the work of the generations before, and with new tools, the scaffolding gets a little taller.”

Superintelligence to become a new normal by 2028

Altman made a big claim in his speech, saying that we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence. “If we are right, by the end of 2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside inside data centres than outside of them. This is an extraordinary statement to make, and of course, we could be wrong, but I think it really bears serious consideration. A superintelligence, at some point on its development curve, would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me, or doing better research than our best scientists,” he said.