In a new essay on his personal blog, Sam Altman admits that AI's benefits may not be widely distributed — at least not at first.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman has acknowledged that Chinese AI firm DeepSeek did some “nice work” in the creation of the chatbot now rivalling his firm’s ChatGPT. Mr Altman said he was going to meet the competing AI firm, but the meeting would not take place during this week’s AI Action Summit in Paris, which he will attend on Tuesday.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman says human-level intelligence is coming – and it won’t be fair - AGI could supercharge wealth inequality and be used to ‘control the population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy’,

In contrast with OpenAI, which follows a closed model, DeepSeek’s AI model discloses its full chain of reasoning in an open source model. Altman called DeepSeek’s R1 model “impressive” during a short thread on X.com early last week.

As such, Altman said the company’s mission now is focused “more towards individual empowerment” as it works toward AGI, while making efforts to prevent such systems from being used by authoritarian governments to “control their population through mass surveillance” and forestall the “loss of autonomy.”

"Moore's law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger," Altman wrote in a blog post on Sunday.