Sam Says Some Things

Welcome to the Tech Vu ride home from Monday, 02/23/2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Sam Altman has a lot of stuff to say about AI, and let's just say comms needs to have a quiet word with him. SAS may or may not be dead, but is the replacement vertical AI and a big thought experiment. If the AI bulls are right and AI transforms the economy, what might that look like? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Sam Altman has been saying some things, and you can do some real tea leaf reading into some of the things he said. First, quoting the Indian Express. In his recent outing with Expressada, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke about meeting the staggering future demands of artificial intelligence. When Anat Glentka, executive director of the Indian Express, asked about putting data centers in space, Altman quipped saying the idea was ridiculous. This is in stark contrast to Altman's chief rival, billionaire Elon Musk, who has been speaking profusely about moving AI computation off Earth into space, specifically into orbit, with the help of satellites and solar power. Putting data centers in space with the current landscape is ridiculous. Orbital data centers are not going to matter at scale this decade due to the rough math of launch costs and how hard it is to fix a broken GPU in space, Altman told Glencke. Other than the massive physical infrastructure of AI, the landscape seems to be also shaped by intense personal dynamics and rivalries. Altman's relationship with Musk has been famously fraught. During the interview, Guntke asked Altman to weigh the probabilities of two highly unlikely scenarios, whether Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing would lose its global monopoly on chip manufacturing or if he and Musk would ever become friends again. Altman was unambiguous in his response. I think Musk and I becoming friends again is less likely, he admitted, adding with a touch of humor. I feel like I have more control over that one, end quote. Now from Gizmodo, quote, Sam Altman is starting to get the sneaking suspicion that companies might be using the technology he's dedicated his life to once it turned out to be extremely profitable as cover for their own interests. In an interview with CNBC TV eighteen at the India AI Impact Summit, the founder and CEO of OpenAI suggested that AI has become a scapegoat that is wrongly being blamed for the mass layoffs that continue to hit basically every sector of the economy. I don't know what the exact percentage is, but there's some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there's some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs, Altman said. Of course, Altman's gotta thread the needle here. He does, in fact, need people to believe his company's technology can replace people. That has kinda become the whole pitch to corporations looking to pour money into AI despite …