Sam Altman admits he underestimated how slowly AI would reshape the economy

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly acknowledged that he misjudged the pace at which artificial intelligence would disrupt the economy following the release of GPT-4 in 2023. Speaking on David Senra's podcast, Altman said he had anticipated far greater economic upheaval than actually materialized. He attributed the slower-than-expected shift not to the technology itself, but to human behavioral inertia, noting that people continue using familiar tools and patronizing the same businesses. Altman also conceded that the broader AI community has been overly optimistic about development timelines, a view consistent with his own revised AGI forecast, now pushed to 2030.