AI awaiting its iPhone moment, says Altman; needs to learn key Apple lesson

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that AI is still awaiting its iPhone moment, and that he needs to learn a key lesson from Apple.

He also admits that he was overly ambitious in his idea of how quickly AI would disrupt the economy, but thinks that, paradoxically, the tech will create new opportunities for businesses that don’t use it …

AI awaiting the iPhone moment

Altman made the comments in a David Senra podcast episode reported by TNW. He likened the current AI era to the smartphone days prior to the launch of the iPhone. Many of us in the tech world owned Windows CE, Nokia, and PalmOS devices from the mid-1990s, but it was the iPhone that transformed smartphones from nerdy pocket computers to mass-market devices.

Altman compared the current phase to smartphones before Apple arrived. He had a Palm Treo around 2003 […] “We have all of the technological pieces, but we have not had the iPhone moment of completely changing how someone interfaces with technology.”

He says that AI companies, including his own, haven’t yet found the magic formula to really bring the tech into everyday consumer life.

He needs to learn a key Apple lesson

Steve Jobs famously said that one of the key reasons Apple was successful was that the company didn’t try to do too much, saying “no” to a thousand good ideas in order to fully focus on the very few products where the company said “yes.”

Altman referenced this, saying he was bad at killing good ideas in order to protect the great ones.

The greatest small business boom ever

He believes one of the key changes we are going to see is “the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses that we have ever seen.”

In part, this will be because of the things AI makes possible, but he also predicts a less obvious outcome. He says some businesses will succeed “precisely because they have nothing to do with AI; people will want authentic, non-technological experiences.”

The episode sounds well worth listening to, and I have it in my queue.

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Photo by Mathieu Improvisato on Unsplash