OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his most famous product has helped him manage life as an actual parent.
“I cannot imagine having gone through, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” Altman told Jimmy Fallon during an interview on NBC’s flagship late-night talk show. “Clearly, people did it for a long time — no problem.”
Altman said he feels “kind of bad” asking a technology that boasts such wide-knowledge questions like, “Why does my kid stop dropping pizza on the floor and laughing?”
Another example, Altman said, was a couple of months ago when he was at a party talking to someone who was also raising a newborn. Altman recalled that the parents said their six-month-old was “crawling everywhere.” Altman said he grew concerned that his son was not at the same stage.
“I ran to the bathroom, and I was like, do I need to take my kid to the doctor tomorrow morning?” Altman said, describing what he typed into ChatGPT: “Is this okay?”
Altman said OpenAI’s chatbot responded “with a great answer, which was of course,” his son’s development was “normal.”
“It is personalized, like ChatGPT gets to know you, and by the way, you’re the CEO of OpenAI, you probably are around all these high-achieving people, maybe you don’t want to project that onto your kid, and you should just relax, and he’ll be fine, whatever,” Altman told Fallon of the answer.
Fallon didn’t touch on OpenAI’s recent struggles. Last week, Altman reportedly declared a “code red” in a private message to employees, ordering a greater focus on ChatGPT as competitors like Google make significant advancements with their competing AI models.
Instead, Altman’s late-night debut featured the lighthearted fare that’s standard on late-night TV. At one point, Fallon asked Altman to explain what ChatGPT is in case viewers who were unaware, including the host’s dad, might be watching.
Altman has spoken in the past about how becoming a parent has added another lens to his outlook on AI.
“My kid is never going to grow up being smarter than AI,” Altman said during a January episode of the “Re:Thinking” podcast with Adam Grant. “Children in the future will only know a world with AI in it.”
The OpenAI CEO and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, welcomed their son in February with an announcement on X. Despite Altman’s stature, the couple has led a relatively private life.
Fallon, who has two daughters, also joked with Altman about when their kids reached certain developmental milestones, like crawling.
“Mine was on Dancing with the Stars at seven months,” Fallon said. “Semi-finalist.”
