OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says having a kid has been “amazing” and thinks everyone else should have one, too.
He also says AGI could maybe help with that.
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a still theoretical version of AI that reasons as well as humans. Achieving AGI is the ultimate goal of many of the leading AI companies and is what’s largely driving the AI talent wars.
Meanwhile, the world’s population growth is slowing down. In the United States, Gen Z and millennials are delaying having children or not having children at all to focus on their financial stability. Some prominent futurists, including Altman, say that’s a cause for concern.
He said this trend is a “real problem” during an episode of “People by WTF” with Nikhil Kamath on Thursday. Altman, who had his first child earlier this year, said he hopes that building families and creating community “will become far more important in a post-AGI world.”
He said he thinks this will be possible because AGI will allow for a world “where people have more abundance, more time, more resources, and potential, and ability.” As AI progresses and becomes a more useful tool, he says society will grow richer and there will be more social support.
“I think it’s pretty clear that family and community are two of the things that make us the happiest, and I hope we will turn back to that,” Altman said.
When Kamath asked about Altman’s own experience with fatherhood, the CEO said he strongly recommends having children. “It felt like the most important and meaningful and fulfilling thing I could imagine doing,” he said.
Altman has described himself as “extremely kid-pilled” and said that in the first weeks of being a dad, he was “constantly” asking ChatGPT questions. Using AI is a skill that he says he plans to pass down to his children.
“My kids will never be smarter than AI,” Altman said on an episode of The OpenAI Podcast in June. “They will grow up vastly more capable than we grew up, and able to do things that we cannot imagine, and they’ll be really good at using AI.”
Altman isn’t the only prominent CEO in the AI industry who’s passionate about procreation. Elon Musk, the founder of Grok-maker xAI, among other companies, has fathered over 10 known children. Musk has said he’s “doing his best to help the underpopulation crisis.”
“A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” Musk said in an X post in 2022.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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