Sam Altman reveals reason he had to delete TikTok off his phone completely
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAi, has revealed the reason behind why he had to delete the TikTok app completely off his phone.
This comes as the tech mogul sat down to speak with Ti Morse for an episode of his Relentless podcast.
During the conversation, Altman talked about having to remove TikTok from his phone, explaining: “I deleted TikTok because it was just too powerful.”
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When asked if he had been addicted to the social media platform, Altman continued: “So here’s a crazy thing that happened. When we were building the Sora app, I made myself get addicted to TikTok because I wanted to just, like, learn. I had never really used it before. I mean, people would send me a TikTok or whatever, but I never got sucked into it. And I was like, ‘I really don’t want to build something that is going to have that kind of thing’ and I loved it. I love TikTok. I really thought it was great, and then I thought I could control it. I was like, ‘Oh, you know, it's actually kind of fun, but I only use it for like 10 minutes to wind down before bed and I'm totally in control of it’. And then it was like an hour one night and then some Saturday afternoon I was on the couch for like three hours and I was like, this is like really not what I thought the iPhone was supposed to be about.
“Now I'm really enjoying in the moment like a drug but I can tell it's bad for me. And then I briefly got it back under control and I was down to like five/10 minutes a night whatever you know like a little wind down before bed. Then I was just like enough. I think the iPhone is amazing and yet I did not feel like I had enough self-control to keep that app or I did not feel like the notifications on messaging apps were like a net good thing for me.”
The AI boss also spoke about the future of artificial intelligence, revealing that the advancements of the tech does not mean we can expect shorter work weeks.
Altman explained: “Technology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure and it has gone in that direction, I think people do have more time for leisure than they had at many previous points in history and a higher quality of life in many ways but somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour workweek at mass scale in society, and I don’t expect AI to change that.”