• Sam Altman appeared on The Tonight Show to highlight ChatGPT’s global growth and positive impact
• He called AI an “equalizing force” that gives powerful tools to everyday people
• While acknowledging risks, Altman remained upbeat about AI’s future and OpenAI’s responsibility

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took a kind of victory lap mixed with cautionary warnings on The Tonight Show this week, telling host Jimmy Fallon that ChatGPT’s meteoric rise has been a great boon, but one that comes with a few growing pains.

Altman leaned into optimism, though perhaps not blind boosterism. He shared his belief that AI, particularly the systems coming out of OpenAI, is helping to reshape society in profoundly positive ways. He compared the rise of ChatGPT to the global spread of the smartphone.

"I think there's many downsides to technology, but there's a lot of upsides. And one of the upsides is, it is a sort of equalizing force in many ways," Altman said. "The richest, most powerful person in the world got the same piece of hardware that, you know, billions of other people got. And I think AI is pushing in the same direction."

Though one of the architects of the current AI boom, Altman is not necessarily a face known to casual TV audiences. However, he set out to change that by presenting his pro-AI case in person to Fallon, explaining that more than 800 million people now use ChatGPT weekly.

“That’s a three-year-old technology,” he added. “No other technology has ever been... adopted by the world this fast. It is a truly general-purpose thing."

For Altman, that speed means people are voting with their time and trust. They’re using ChatGPT not as a novelty but as a tool for all kinds of tasks in their lives. AI is helping them write résumés, code software, generate travel plans, and manage their day-to-day.

He sees AI, especially as implemented in ChatGPT, as a distribution of power, not a concentration of it. Yes, OpenAI is backed by Microsoft and armed with billions in cloud compute. But the output, he argued, is shared.

AI all over

Notably, he didn’t arrive on Fallon’s stage to make an announcement or pitch a product, despite the rumored GPT-5.2 release this week. Not having anything to plug suggests he really just wants people to believe that ChatGPT and AI as a whole are useful innovations.

Altman didn't ignore the complications of AI in his interview, though.

“One of the things that I’m worried about,” he admitted, “is just the rate of change that’s happening in the world right now.” But he wants people to adapt, to weigh in, to build guardrails. “You could imagine us getting that wrong.”

On a surface level, Altman made an eloquent case, though it was hardly the venue to explore the bigger issues surrounding how AI tools are developed and used. There was no room to discuss issues of privacy, content ownership and use, or the resources devoted to AI and the potentially perilous economic fate of the technology.

Altman’s trip to late-night TV was not flashy, but his vision of AI as a utopian equalizer certainly is colorful. Whether that will translate to long-term success may depend on what he does next.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.