Like millions of Americans, OpenAI’s Sam Altman unwinds from thinking about AI by scrolling on TikTok before bed: 'I happen to like short-form video'

OpenAI chief Sam Altman spends his workdays thinking about AI, but his off-hours can look a lot like everyone else’s. This week he told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff that he likes “5 or 10 minutes” of short-form video before bed to relax. Plainly put, he scrolls TikTok to wind down.

The catch is that the habit didn’t stay small. Altman said he first got into TikTok while OpenAI was building Sora, its now-defunct video generation app, because he wanted to understand the format better. A few minutes turned into an hour. One Saturday afternoon, it stretched to three. He eventually deleted the app because, as he put it on the Relentless podcast in July, it was “just too powerful.”

That tug-of-war seems to have sharpened his view of the app. Altman, who was president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, now says he would not let his kids near TikTok. He called it dangerous, especially for Gen Alpha, and said he doesn’t think children should be expected to resist what he called the dopamine pull of short-form video.

The concern isn’t abstract. A Pew Research Center survey this year of TikTok users ages 13 to 17 found that 28% said they spend too much time on the app, 37% said it has hurt their sleep, and 29% said it has hurt their productivity. Altman’s own experience, along with fatherhood via surrogacy early last year, has also pushed him to think more seriously about getting AI right for humanity. When he wants something less addictive, he goes back to books, including contemporaneous accounts of earlier tech revolutions.