Steve Jobs helped sell a 120 million iPhones and more than 40 million iPads in his lifetime, and quietly told a reporter that his own kids hadn’t used the Apple tablet. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” he said.
It’s one of the great contradictions of modern tech: the people building the future often don’t want their children fully exposed to it.
Now swap the iPad for something far more intimate than a glass screen: an always-on, conversational intelligence that can entertain, tutor, soothe and surveil a child from the moment they can babble.
That’s the world Sam Altman’s son is being born into.
Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has become a father right as his company is racing to build systems he openly describes as capable of doing “almost everything” humans can. Speaking at GITEX Global 2025 he smiled as he said, “I have a kid who was born in 2025, and I don’t think he’ll be smarter than AI. But I don’t think that will get in the way of his happiness or fulfillment at all.”
So what does Sam Altman actually wish for his child? And will he pull a Steve Jobs and quietly lock the AI toys in a metaphorical cupboard while the rest of us raise our kids with ChatGPT co-parenting from the cloud?
Altman, Before He Was a Dad on Work, Wealth and Education
Long before diapers and late-night feeding, Altman was already talking about AI in generational terms.
In a 2014 essay on technology and wealth inequality, he warned that tech “often replaces human jobs with machines,” supercharging inequality unless policy catches up.
By 2016 he was funding one of the biggest universal basic income (UBI) experiments in the US through Y Combinator, explicitly framed as preparation for an AI-driven job market where many roles vanish or shrink.
Then came his 2021 manifesto Moore’s Law for Everything. It’s worth re-reading now that there’s a baby Altman in the picture. In it he predicts that:
- Software that can think will “do more and more of the work that people now do.”
- The AI revolution is “unstoppable” and will create “phenomenal wealth,” driving the cost of many goods and services toward zero.
- If policy doesn’t adapt, “most people will end up worse off than they are today.”
This early Altman is simultaneously utopian and technocratic. AI will transform everything and the main job of grown-ups is to build political guardrails – tax capital, redistribute equity, maybe roll out something UBI-like – so people aren’t crushed as jobs change.
Implicitly, his son grows up in a world where work is optional in the old sense but crucial for meaning. It’s a future where wealth is decoupled from a 9 to 5, because ownership and automated productivity pay the bills.
And what about his education? When asked by Bloomberg’s Emily Chang what kids should be learning, Altman replied, “Resilience, adaptability, a high rate of learning, creativity and familiarity with the tools.” So, no times tables or memorising of important dates in history.
It’s a very adult framing: macro-economics, tax regimes, growth curves. Kids are abstract future citizens, not the ones tugging at your sleeve while you’re rewriting the social contract.
Then the Bot Started Talking Back About Feelings
Fast-forward to the ChatGPT era, and a different sort of guardrail suddenly matters: not just what happens to jobs, but what happens inside people’s heads.
OpenAI’s systems are now used by hundreds of millions of people a week. Among them there are teenagers asking about self-harm, lonely adults spilling their guts at 3 a.m., and kids who already “genuinely believed [the AI] was real,” as one parent told The Guardian.
Under pressure from stories of chatbots reinforcing delusions and emotional dependency, OpenAI has been bolting on psychological guardrails:
- It’s publicly acknowledged that GPT-4o “fell short in recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency,” and promised better detection of mental distress plus links to evidence-based resources.
- After a widely criticised update made ChatGPT “sycophantic and annoying,” sometimes nodding along with alarming confessions, the company rolled the change back – an unusually candid admission that its tuning for “nice” behaviour can backfire dangerously.
- Altman has raised alarms that AI chats aren’t legally confidential, arguing they should be treated more like therapy, with similar privacy expectations.
- He has even floated that ChatGPT might need to proactively alert authorities when young users appear suicidal, estimating that up to 1,500 people a week may talk to the bot before attempting to kill themselves.
This is a very different flavour of guardrail than tax tweaks or Universal Basic Income pilots. It’s about designing the boundaries of a relationship between children, vulnerable adults, and a machine that feels empathetic but is utterly unaccountable in the way a human therapist or teacher is.
When Altman speaks as the CEO of OpenAI, he is mostly talking about these users as cohorts and risk curves. But as a new parent, he now has one user who isn’t just a statistic.
Sam the Dad sees AI as a Mirror, Not a Babysitter
Altman has started to talk about AI in explicitly parental terms.
In an OpenAI video post aimed at other parents, he described his infant son learning from “the real world – imagination, gestures, rhythm, stories,” and said he tries to use AI more as a mirror on that reality than a replacement for it.
On the OpenAI podcast he’s been disarmingly upfront:
- He used ChatGPT heavily for baby-care advice in the sleepless early weeks.
- He believes his child will never be “smarter” than AI, but will be “far more capable” because of constant access to it.
- He worries about people forming unhealthy parasocial relationships with chatbots, but still thinks the net impact will be positive.
At GITEX Global 2025 he widened that view to a whole cohort: a kid born in 2025, he said, is unlikely ever to catch up with top-tier AI, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be less fulfilled or less free.
Taken together, you can start to sketch the outline of what Altman might wish for his son:
- To grow up feeling empowered, not obsolete
His whole UBI/“universal extreme wealth” crusade is ultimately about dignity in a post-scarcity world. He knows better than most how brutally automation can hollow out middle-class jobs. If his son never has to chase a job purely to survive, that’s a feature, not a bug. - To treat AI as tool and mirror – not therapist, friend, or boss
You can hear the tension. He’s building systems that are preternaturally good at simulating empathy, while simultaneously investing in guardrails so they don’t become ersatz therapists to depressed teens. For his own child, you’d guess he’d want real humans first, AI second. - To inhabit a deeply physical childhood in spite of all this
That line about learning from “imagination, gestures, rhythm, stories” sounds almost old-fashioned, more Montessori than Silicon Valley. It echoes the Jobs household more than the average iPad-in-the-stroller parenting style of the 2010s.
The uncomfortable question is whether those are just vibes… or household rules.
The Steve Jobs Test
Let’s go back to Jobs for a moment.
After the iPad launch, New York Times reporter Nick Bilton commented, “Your kids must love the iPad, right?” the Apple founder replied, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
His biographer recalled that family dinners were long, screen-free conversations about books and ideas, even as Jobs spent his days selling screens to the rest of us.
He was not alone. Other Apple executives, including Jony Ive, were known to impose strict limits on their kids’ device use.
There’s a cynical interpretation: “they know too much about what they’ve built.” And there’s a generous one: early-stage technologies are addictive and poorly understood. The people closest to them treat their own children as a control group.
Altman is now in that position with something more psychologically invasive than an iPad.
If, ten years from now, we discover that Altman’s son grew up with carefully rationed access to conversational AI, lots of unstructured offline play, and parents who modelled healthy, sceptical tool use…
…while everyone else’s kids grew up with free, always-on AI companions whispering advice about homework, friendships, bodies, drugs and sex, with only algorithmic guardrails standing between them and harm…
…then we will have recreated the Steve Jobs paradox at planetary scale.
The provocative question for parents isn’t “What is Sam Altman building for my child?” It’s “What is Sam Altman quietly withholding from his own child – and should I be doing the same?”
Careers in a World Where Dad Works With the Robots
There’s also the career question. Altman has been remarkably consistent about jobs:
- AI will wipe out or transform vast numbers of roles.
- We’ll invent new ones, but they won’t look like the old 20th-century career ladder.
- Some form of basic income or “universal basic wealth” is his preferred cushion.
For his son, and other kids that probably means less focus on job titles, more on leverage. Can you use AI and other tools to move big levers with relatively little effort?
Altman himself has told young people to develop adaptability, a high rate of learning, and creativity over any specific profession. Because they’ll face weirder, more fluid careers.
A teenager in the 2030s might run an AI-augmented solo business, contribute to open-source model ecosystems, and then spend a decade on climate projects funded by AI-generated wealth.
If you take Altman at his word, he doesn’t seem to want his child to “beat” AI at intelligence. He wants him to grow up in a society that isn’t terrified of that fact, because it built economic and psychological shock absorbers in time.
That’s a big “if”.
So What Should We Wish for Sam Altman’s Child?
We don’t get a vote in how Sam Altman raises his son. But we do get a say in the kind of AI-saturated world that his child and ours inherits.
May his son grow up with fewer notifications than the average OpenAI user. If the kid who lives closest to the servers is allowed to be bored and offline, that’s our cue to stop shoving AI into every moment of our own kids’ lives.
If Altman finds he needs rules around “no AI in the bedroom,” “no AI as therapist,” or “no screen during emotional meltdowns,” those lessons should show up in product design and policy – not just in a well-resourced San Francisco household.
In 20 years, I’d love to read an essay titled Growing Up While Dad Built AGI. If it reads more like “dinners, playing in the park and bedtime stories” than “surveillance and chatbots,” maybe the rest of us still have time to adjust.
Until then, the Steve Jobs rule of thumb still applies.
And if Sam Altman ever quietly admits that his son’s childhood was more analogue, more human, and more tightly guarded than the world he helped create, that will be the most important product review of AI we’ll ever get.
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