OpenAI boss Sam Altman met with New York City business leaders at a closed-door event on Tuesday — and talked up artificial intelligence’s potential to jumpstart the city’s economy, The Post has learned.
Altman, whose firm recently secured a $300 billion valuation, was interviewed by Hearst CEO Steven Swartz for about 45 minutes at the fireside-chat style event and laid out his view about how AI would rapidly progress over the next three years, sources told The Post.
The high-profile guest list at the event, which was hosted by the Partnership for New York City, included billionaire KKR cofounder Henry Kravis, Tishman Speyer CEO Rob Speyer, Related Companies CEO Jeff Blau and PFNYC boss Kathy Wylde, the sources said.
When reached for comment, the Partnership for New York City confirmed that 100 of its members were in attendance to hear Altman.
“[Altman] projects that New York will see enormous economic benefits from leading in AI, so long as the state continues to embrace the rapidly changing AI sector and does not seek to over-regulate it,” the organization said in a statement.
“He described the importance of educating students and the workforce on how to use AI tools to enhance their own performance and take advantage of the improvements in quality of life that AI can help them achieve,” the statement added.
OpenAI’s chief economist Ronnie Chatterji was also on hand and gave a presentation on AI’s potential to boost productivity in the workforce.
OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
Alongside Altman’s speech, OpenAI also shared an economic report on its business ties to New York while touting the city’s potential to “become a global capital of the Intelligence Age, with artificial intelligence generating significant revenue, jobs and growth.”
“Even in moderate forecasts, economists estimate that AI could raise productivity growth by a few percentage points,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
“If the US economy were to grow just 1 percentage point faster every year, compounded over a decade, we’d be nearly $3 trillion richer – more than the annual GDP of New York State,” the report added.
OpenAI’s report touted high levels of AI adoption in New York. The state ranks second in the country in terms of the number of developers currently building using OpenAI’s AI framework, trailing only California, according to the report.
The company said it has more employees at its SoHo office than at any other physical location outside of its San Francisco headquarters and has “room to triple in size” in NYC.
New York City also ranks as OpenAI’s top market in the world by active enterprise users of its technology, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York Mellon, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Oscar Health among its customers.
On a consumer level, New York ranks third in the country behind California and Texas for weekly active users of its ChatGPT chatbot.
