OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently sat down with tech journalist Cleo Abram to discuss the launch of GPT-5 and share his vision for artificial intelligence’s trajectory. During their conversation, Altman made a striking declaration about the future relationship between human intelligence and AI.
“A kid born today will never be smarter than AI, ever,” Altman stated plainly during the interview. He elaborated on this concept, explaining that children entering the world now will grow up in an entirely different reality than previous generations.
He stated: “A kid born today, by the time that kid understands the way the world works, will just always be used to an incredibly fast rate of things improving and discovering new science. They will never know any other world.”
According to Altman, this represents a major shift in human experience. These children will find it completely natural to interact with technology far more intelligent than themselves.
“It will seem unthinkable and stone age like that we used to use computers or phones or any kind of technology that was not way smarter than we were,” he explained. Looking back at our current era, he predicted: “We will think how bad those people of the 2020s had it.”
When asked about parenting advice for raising children in this AI-saturated future, Altman’s response was surprisingly traditional.
“Probably nothing different than the way you’ve been parenting kids for tens of thousands of years,” he said. “Love your kids, show them the world, support them in whatever they want to do and teach them how to be a good person. And that probably is what’s going to matter.”
Altman envisions a world of expanded possibility rather than limitation. “I want my kid to think I had a terrible constrained life and that he has this incredible infinite canvas of stuff to do,” he shared.
Rather than seeing AI superiority as a threat to human potential, he frames it as liberation from constraint. “If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history,” Altman said, pointing to unprecedented opportunities for creation and innovation enabled by AI tools.
He stated: ” Because there’s never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new, to go invent something, to start a company, whatever it is. ”
The OpenAI CEO believes young people will adapt naturally to this rapid pace of change. “The remarkable ability of humanity to adapt to kind of any amount of change, we’ll just be like, okay, this is it,” he noted. For children growing up in this environment, constant technological advancement and AI assistance will simply be the baseline of existence.
Altman believes AI will fundamentally reshape education, work, and human creativity. He described GPT-5’s capabilities as enabling people to “express ideas and try things and play with things in such real time” that the creative process itself transforms.
Rather than replacing human thought, he sees AI as a tool that allows people to “think more than they ever have before.”
