Man who started AI boom spooked by its capabilities, says he feels useless: ‘What have we done?’

“I felt useless relative to the AI in this thing that I felt I should have been able to do, and I couldn’t, and it was really hard. But the AI just did it like that. It was a weird feeling,” Altman said during the podcast.

Altman likened the development of GPT-5 to the Manhattan Project, the World War II initiative that produced the first atomic bomb, emphasising the urgent pace and immense power of modern AI. “There are moments in the history of science, where you have a group of scientists look at their creation and just say, you know: ‘What have we done?’,” he said.

One of the standout differences this time around is OpenAI’s reported plan to release “mini” and “nano” versions of GPT-5 via its API. This move could dramatically broaden access, possibly even reaching users on the free tier, making the new model more widely available than its predecessors.

Another major leap is GPT-5’s expected integration of the o3 reasoning engine, once rumoured to be a standalone system, directly into the model.

However, Altman also touched on some of the broader concerns surrounding advanced AI. Speaking about the emotional and psychological impact of users forming bonds with AI companions, he expressed caution. “I’m scared of that… I don’t think we know quite the ways in which it’s going to have those negative impacts, but I feel for sure it’s going to have some and we’ll have to,” he said.