At a closed door conversation with select editors, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke candidly about the accelerating economics of AI, the shifting nature of work, and the strategic choices countries will face as the technology becomes deeply embedded in daily life. From India’s rapid adoption of AI tools to questions of energy use, learning, and the future of personal agents, Altman offered a wide angle view of how the next phase of AI may unfold. Edited excerpts:
People usually compare the energy cost of a human at inference time—the moment they solve something—with the total training energy of an AI model. But a person also requires a huge amount of energy over their lifetime to “train”—to grow, to run their body and brain for decades, not to mention the evolutionary process that operated at vast scale to produce human intelligence in the first place.
So, these models are already surprisingly efficient per token at inference time, relative to the energy required for a human to generate a token of thought. I expect that efficiency to continue improving significantly. My view is that, per unit of intellectual capability, energy cost will not be the dominant factor—the models will be extremely efficient.
But because we will use such large volumes of AI, the global energy footprint will still matter.
Which is also why the reskilling question is so hard. I wouldn’t have known to tell anyone to train to be a YouTuber—and maybe I still wouldn’t—but right now we’re in a moment where it’s difficult to say what the best jobs will be 10 years from now. There are skills that will certainly matter: Resilience, adaptability and fluency with AI tools. When I was at university, everyone was told they needed to learn to code. That was good advice at the time; it’s probably not the best advice now. But I do think everyone needs to learn to become skilled at using AI tools—and that will be important.
It’s our fastest growing market for Codex; someone just told me it may become the largest Codex market soon. I don’t yet know what this will mean for the country in the long term, but I don’t know of any other country adopting AI with more vigour.
My sense is that, at the very least, we’ll see an incredible new generation of startups doing great work here. I think India has to be a revenue market. One thing that’s different about AI compared to previous internet services is that the cost of delivering these services is simply higher. So, to meet the volume of AI usage India will demand, we’ll have to find ways for it to be an attractive market as well.
They wanted us to promise not to use it because, in their view, it removed the reason to learn. All of us said, “This is ridiculous. As adults we’ll be able to use Google at work—so let’s use our brains for something else.” It took a little time, but the education system eventually adapted. It is important to learn how to think.
There are things I learnt—like how to write an essay—that I’m still glad I learnt the old-fashioned way, because they taught me something about how to think, and that remains useful. I suspect that if we make no changes to how we teach and assess students, then yes, they might end up doing too much cognitive offloading to these tools.
But the right answer seems to be to assume we are moving to this next level of technological capability—that people will have these tools—and then develop new ways to teach, challenge and evaluate them… assume the tools exist, but still require people to think, be creative and stretch their minds.
First Published: Mar 26, 2026, 11:39
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