Sam Altman says he would be ashamed if OpenAI weren't the first company run by an AI CEO (www.businessinsider.com)

On the "Conversations with Tyler" podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he expects — and would be proud — for OpenAI to be the first major company run by an AI CEO, adding that he’d be “ashamed” if it weren’t. Altman said he often asks what would need to happen for an AI to do a “much, much better job” than him and believes that within a single-digit number of years AI could already run a major department at OpenAI. He framed this as part of a broader transition: short-term job disruption followed by new kinds of work, and quipped that when he’s replaced he’d like to spend more time farming. The comments are notable for setting an explicit timeline and organizational expectation from one of AI’s highest-profile leaders. Technically, Altman’s claim implies accelerating progress on robust decision-making, domain-general reasoning, delegation, and safe autonomy sufficient to lead complex operational and strategic functions. For the AI/ML community, that raises practical questions about governance, verification, alignment and accountability mechanisms needed to entrust high-stakes corporate leadership to models — plus the engineering challenges of transparency, robustness and oversight as AI systems assume managerial responsibilities.