Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, testifies before a Senate committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Source: AP Photo)The singularity, long viewed as a distant milestone in artificial intelligence, has already arrived, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.The ChatGPT-maker’s frontman reiterated that humanity is already in the singularity, stating that the pace of AI development in the past decade has ushered in an era of superintelligence. Altman made these remarks in a recent appearance on a YouTube podcast episode titled ‘How to start a startup’ hosted by Ti Morse.In response to a question about what drives top tech CEOs and how the way they currently operate differs from ten years ago, Altman responded, ““The thing that drives me the most is…this is the most interesting important thing I can imagine doing and we are now in the singularity, this is the moment ….10 years ago this was like a far off dream at best. It seemed very improbable and now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not serious way,” Altman said.“I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying. I’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens,” he added.According to Altman, AI has been advancing along an exponential curve and there has been no single defining moment that can be highlighted as the tipping point. However, “we are somehow in another one of those decisive periods where the curve can go one way or another like it was when we started 10 years ago,” the chief executive added.This is not the first time that Altman has declared that humanity is currently in the singularity. In June 2025, he published a blog post titled ‘The Gentle Singularity’ where he argued that humanity has crossed the “event horizon” of AI development, and that the process of building digital superintelligence has officially begun.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Sam Altman at Express Adda: Why training a human for 20 years uses more energy than ChatGPT“We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started […] Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence,” he wrote. In the same blog post, Altman laid out specific timelines for AI progress. He said that by 2026, AI systems will be capable of generating genuinely novel scientific insights, and not just summarising existing research. He further predicted that robots performing real-world physical tasks will be commonplace by 2027.While Altman said significant questions around AI alignment, safety, and the future of jobs remain unresolved, he suggested they are not the central challenge facing AI today.“…the fight of the current moment is are we going to head to a world of AI authoritarianism or liberty? Are we going to decide that because of the very real safety issues and economic issues that we want one single model to be the machine god or the company associated to do that or are we going to say what it’s going to be,” Altman said.“It may be a little messy but every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety it’s been a long-term net loss and so we are going to put this in the hands of people, we’re going to empower them. We are going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want,” he added.Story continues below this adInterestingly, Altman also revealed on the podcast that he became addicted to TikTok while working on the company’s AI video generation app, Sora. The app was seen as a potential AI-powered challenger to short-form video sharing platforms like TikTok and Instagram, but it was eventually shut down earlier this year as OpenAI deprioritised certain projects ahead of its IPO.“When we were building the Sora app, I made myself get addicted to TikTok because I wanted to learn. I was like, you know, I had never really used it before. I mean, people would send me a TikTok or whatever, but I never got sucked into it. And I was like, I really don’t want to build something that is going to have that kind of thing, absorb people’s time,” Altman said.Also Read | Why OpenAI is shutting down its viral AI video app Sora“And then I thought I could control it. I was like, ‘Oh, you know, it’s actually kind of fun, but I only use it for like 10 minutes to wind down before bed and I’m totally in control of it.’ And then it was like an hour one night, and then some Saturday afternoon I was on the couch for like three hours,” Altman added. “And I was like, this is really not what I thought the iPhone was supposed to be about. Now I’m really enjoying it in the moment, like a drug, but I can tell it’s bad for me,” he further said.