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title: Dear peasants: Sam Altman on how some of his rivals sell AI
description: Sam Altman told podcaster David Senra that the AI industry, including himself, has been too ambitious on adoption timelines because the economy has far more...
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# Dear peasants: Sam Altman on how some of his rivals sell AI

**[The Next Web](https://daily.dev/sources/tnw)** · 7 min read · 3 upvotes · 1 comments

## Summary

Sam Altman told podcaster David Senra that the AI industry, including himself, has been too ambitious on adoption timelines because the economy has far more inertia than expected, comparing it to how people kept renting from Blockbuster after Netflix launched. He pushed back on Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's claim that 2026 will be the year every business feels up for grabs, argued AI has not yet had its 'iPhone moment' because the missing piece is product design rather than technology, and admitted he still resists using his own AI tools out of habit. He also mocked a rival pitch of trading cheap goods and cures for cancer in exchange for ceding control over the future to a few companies, remarks widely read as aimed at Anthropic's Dario Amodei, even though Altman himself made a similar pitch about curing cancer with compute in a blog post last year. He detailed OpenAI's decisions to kill Sora and its Atlas browser to focus on Codex and ChatGPT, and said OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO with a possible 2027 listing.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://thenextweb.com/news/sam-altman-ai-timelines-wrong-inertia-senra-podcast>

## Questions this post answers

### Why did OpenAI shut down Sora and the Atlas browser?

OpenAI shut down Sora because it consumed significant compute resources and mattered less strategically than Codex, and it shut down its Atlas browser because that talent was needed elsewhere, even though Sam Altman still considers Atlas to have been the best browser available. Both moves reflect a push to make OpenAI a platform company with one interface and one API rather than competing across many products.

_developers tracking which OpenAI products survive or get cut can follow the fallout on daily.dev._

### What did Sam Altman say about being too optimistic on AI disruption timelines?

Sam Altman said the AI industry, including himself, has been too ambitious about how quickly AI would disrupt businesses after GPT-4 launched in 2023, because the economy has far more inertia than expected, with people continuing to buy from the same companies out of habit, similar to how people kept renting from Blockbuster after Netflix launched DVD mailing. He called the resulting slower transition a positive outcome.

_anyone planning product bets around AI adoption speed can weigh takes like this on daily.dev._

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@taiwofrancis** · 0 upvotes

> We keep talking about what AI can do, but getting people to actually change how they work might be the real bottleneck.

## Similar posts on daily.dev

- [Altman's U-turn: from wanting an AI CEO to no one does](https://daily.dev/posts/altman-s-u-turn-from-wanting-an-ai-ceo-to-no-one-does-mwvmvowur) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments
- [Sam Altman isn’t the only one who wants to pump the brakes on AI](https://daily.dev/posts/sam-altman-isn-t-the-only-one-who-wants-to-pump-the-brakes-on-ai-7a2svedxn) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments
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---

Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#openai](https://daily.dev/tags/openai), [#anthropic](https://daily.dev/tags/anthropic)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/dear-peasants-sam-altman-on-how-some-of-his-rivals-sell-ai-qleen8xju)

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