It is hard for most people to appreciate how fast AI is really progressing, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has come up with an analogy that many would relate with.
In a recent discussion, Altman drew on a visceral personal memory — a long, cold walk through San Francisco at the very start of the Covid pandemic — to describe how he feels about AI’s trajectory right now. His point: a massive, world-altering change is already underway, most people haven’t registered it yet, and those closest to the technology are watching the clock.
“There was a night in, I guess it would have been late January, early February of 2020, when the OpenAI researchers kind of got obsessed with Covid before the rest of the world did,” Altman recalled. “We were talking about it all the time, and we were watching the numbers every day. We were like, ‘This is going to happen.’ We were making plans to work from home.”
The team’s early alarm drew mockery. “There was an article that came out mocking us, because they were like, ‘These crazy people at OpenAI.’ We had put copper or something on some of the door handles — people, you remember that — and some journalists wrote about it. And we had kind of made our plans and assumed a shutdown was going to happen.”
What Altman remembers most, though, is a solitary walk he took one freezing night before the lockdowns began.
“There is this crazy change. The change has already happened.”
“We were like, ‘There is this thing coming. The world is not paying attention.’ And for whatever reason, something about working on exponential curves makes you understand these things better. I think we were a group of people who were primed for it. And then there was this one night — it was a very cold night. I lived in the Mission at the time, and I was like, ‘I am about to get locked in my house for a while, and I am going to go for a walk — one more time — because who knows what is going to happen.'”
“I went on this long walk through the city, hours, cold night. I was watching people breathe in each other’s faces in restaurants and bars through the windows. I was wearing my mask, looking crazy. There was one other person out wearing a mask, and we kind of nodded at each other. But other than that, life felt totally normal.”
Then comes the pivot — and it lands hard.
“I have not felt that so acutely as I do again in this moment. Where it is like: there is this crazy change. The change has already happened. The models have already hit some level. Society has not digested them yet. We feel like we see it clearly. We are trying to tell the world that it is going to happen. It is hard to get this across. But it feels like that night at the very beginning of Covid, walking through the streets again.”
The analogy is striking precisely because it is not about technology at all — it is about the gap between what a small group of people can see coming and what the rest of the world is willing to believe. In early 2020, that gap closed violently within weeks. Altman is suggesting the same kind of reckoning is approaching with AI, and that the window for unhurried preparation is shorter than most assume.
This is consistent with a pattern in Altman’s recent public remarks. He has previously said that things are going to go a lot faster than people are appreciating right now, and that there will be a faster AI takeoff than he originally thought. In a blog post earlier this year, he noted that the cost of using a given level of AI falls roughly 10x every 12 months — a rate that dwarfs Moore’s Law — and that the socioeconomic value of AI grows super-exponentially as its capabilities increase. At TED 2025, he described ChatGPT’s growth as unlike anything he had ever witnessed, adding that OpenAI’s teams were “exhausted and stressed” trying to keep pace with demand.
The Covid parallel also carries an implicit warning about timing. Altman has said that AI will require a rewriting of social contracts, and that the entire structure of society could be up for reconfiguration. Regulatory frameworks remain thin in most of the world. Businesses across sectors are still largely in the observation phase. If Altman’s analogy holds, the cost of waiting is not linear — it compounds, just as Covid did in those early weeks when the numbers were still small enough to seem dismissible.
That tension sits at the center of Altman’s position. He is simultaneously the person most responsible for accelerating this change and the person most visibly urging the world to take it seriously. YC CEO Garry Tan has credited Altman with pulling forward the AI timeline by a decade — suggesting that without OpenAI’s decision to release ChatGPT publicly, much of this progress would still be locked inside Google’s labs. Whether one finds that inspiring or unsettling, the walk through the Mission in January 2020 is the frame Altman wants us to carry: the streets looked normal right up until they didn’t.