Sam Altman Explains Our AI Future
February 3, 2026
As CEO of OpenAI, the 40-year-old billionaire unleashed ChatGPT, mainstreaming artificial intelligence and creating a $500 billion behemoth. As a new father—with another baby on the way—he’s building the world his kids will live in one day.
Sam Altman says the stick of uranium in his office is nothing to worry about. Sitting vertically on his desk at OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco like a squat ebony Slim Jim, it is perhaps the most eyebrow-raising among the impressive array of historic innovations he has collected over the years. “That’s depleted,” he says casually of the uranium-238 rod, the same element used to create nuclear energy. “It’s not going to hurt you.” He waves a Geiger counter over it and proves his point.
“You make a big discovery in physics and . . . unlock basically unlimited energy,” he says of the uranium rod. “We didn’t know about this, then theorized that such a thing was possible. A couple decades later, they had made an atomic bomb. Just a crazy, fast thing.”