OpenAI CEO Predicts AI Will Act Like Junior Employees by 2026

San Francisco, CA – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman envisions a future where artificial intelligence evolves into teammates capable of discovering new knowledge and solving complex problems by 2026. He described current AI agents as akin to junior employees, who receive tasks and feedback for improvement.

During a keynote conversation at the Snowflake Summit 2025, Altman explained that workers increasingly use AI agents, such as ChatGPT, resembling the dynamics of working with entry-level coworkers. “You hear people that talk about their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, look at the quality, figure out how it fits together, give feedback, and it sounds a lot like how they work with a team of still relatively junior employees,” he said.

Altman predicts that by next year, certain AI agents will transcend basic assistance roles and may even help uncover new insights or develop complex solutions to business challenges. “I would bet next year that in some limited cases, at least in some small ways, we start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge, or can figure out solutions to business problems that are kind of very non-trivial,” he stated.

In related news, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever suggested the need for a “doomsday bunker” before releasing artificial general intelligence (AGI). According to excerpts from the upcoming book “Empire of AI” by Karen Hao, Sutskever announced this during a 2023 meeting with the research team, citing the need for safety measures.

“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” he declared, assuring colleagues that access would be optional. The book also discusses a boardroom coup in November 2023 that momentarily ousted Altman, with Sutskever playing a pivotal role in the incident.