OpenAI's Sam Altman Admits the AI Boom Is Running Late: "We've Not Had the iPhone Moment"

Over the weekend, Sam Altman sat down for a podcast and described the state of AI adoption in terms that would have sounded odd to him a year ago. “We’re still at the palm pilot stage of adoption,” Altman said. “We have all of the technological pieces, but we have not had the iPhone moment of like completely changing how someone interfaces with technology.”

The striking thing is which direction his caution runs. His doubt is aimed at the speed at which people and institutions change around the models, and he pinned the blame on habit rather than capability: “The economy just has so much inertia. People keep doing the same things they’re doing. They keep buying from the same company. I think that means we’ve all been too ambitious on timelines, even with this incredible technology.”

Those are very different claims with very different investment consequences, and the difference matters if you own the picks-and-shovels names.

Palm Pilot Comment Points at People, Not Chips

Altman’s most revealing detail was operational. He told the podcast, “We ditched Sora, for example, because it was taking up too much compute.” A company shelving a flagship consumer product because it consumes too much capacity signals something a forecast cannot.