{"id":504801,"date":"2026-03-05T07:27:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T07:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/504801\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T07:27:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T07:27:21","slug":"sam-altman-jensen-huang-and-the-other-ai-kingpins-only-have-themselves-to-blame-for-the-scare-rippling-through-the-economy-right-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/504801\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman, Jensen Huang and the other AI kingpins only have themselves to blame for the scare rippling through the economy right now"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman is upset that many members of the public aren\u2019t thrilled with AI technology<\/a>. But it\u2019s a problem that Altman and his fellow AI executives themselves created by overhyping their technology while simultaneously rattling the public about their future economic security in an AI-powered world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As AI\u2019s promoter-in-chief, Altman recently spoke of his disappointment with the speed of AI\u2019s advancement at an industry conference. According to The New York Times<\/a>, he complained that there was \u201cmore resistance to \u2018the diffusion, the absorption\u2019 of AI into the culture and economy than he expected.\u201d The Times also quoted Altman as saying \u201cLooking at what\u2019s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s not alone amongst AI titans. Nvidia<\/a> CEO Jensen Huang is quoted in the same story as saying that AI skeptics are \u201cscaring people from making the investments in AI\u201d that would make it better.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which is no surprise, given that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei regularly publishes essays foreseeing AI burning down half of all white collar jobs in the next five years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The executives are blaming others for this crisis in AI confidence. It\u2019s the public\u2019s fault. It\u2019s the market\u2019s fault. It\u2019s the critics\u2019 fault. But the problem is more fundamental: AI\u2019s leading companies have run afoul of a market development principle called the \u201cadjacent possible.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That principle asserts that innovations only truly catch on when two factors connect: One, the new thing works reliably, and two, people understand why they need it. Simply creating a cool new technology is never enough; fail to bring the public along, and you wind up with either weak demand (think Segway) or a backlash (like with nuclear power in the 1980s).\u00a0<\/p>\n

While demand for AI isn\u2019t weak, it\u2019s weaker than its proponents think it should be. And at the same time, a backlash against AI has been brewing over the technology\u2019s potential impacts.<\/p>\n

The concept of the adjacent possible was popularized in Steven Johnson\u2019s 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Historical patterns precede an explosive moment when an innovation \u2013 the pencil, the flush toilet, batteries, the smartphone \u2013 catches on and changes the way we work or live.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPossible\u201d technologies already exist, work well, and have been adopted by consumers and businesses. \u201cNot-yet-possible\u201d technologies are untested, unreliable and not yet well-understood by their target market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, for instance, mass-market electric cars land in the possible. Flying cars in every driveway land in the not-yet-possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The adjacent possible is a thin band between those two zones. Innovations change the world when they land there, stretching boundaries and changing habits \u2014 but not so much that the technology keeps glitching or makes us feel uneasy.\u00a0When an innovation hits this sweet spot, the result is user delight and new consumption patterns that create popular enthusiasm and rapid, broad adoption.<\/p>\n

For example, when the Wright brothers first flew in 1903, all the mechanics and theories necessary \u2014 from the piston engine to wing aerodynamics \u2014 already existed. The Wrights just had to push the technology a bit further by putting the right parts together and adding some key insights of their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And by that point, inventors had been trying for years to fly, so the public was ready to believe a machine could deliver on the promise. Twenty years earlier, powered flight was science fiction to most people. But news of the\u00a0 first successful flight at Kitty Hawk was reported breathlessly by newspapers around the country<\/a>, and airplanes were soon embraced by an excited public.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which circles back to AI. While artificial intelligence has been around for decades, for much of the population it seemed to suddenly slam into their lives with the introduction of OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT in late 2022. AI has since advanced faster than any technology most of us have experienced.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019re being told over and over by the tech crowd that AI is going to change everything \u2013 the way we work, our careers, our art, our politics \u2013 and might even come to control us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too much too fast. The mass market can grasp that AI is better than search. The adjacent possible would tell us that it\u2019s a leap we can make from where we were to where we\u2019re going.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But telling us that we should already have a team of AI agents doing half our jobs and making us ten times more productive \u2013 or alternatively that we\u2019ll all be unemployed in the near future \u2014 is just too far of a leap. Further, it\u2019s a leap attached to a threat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And Altman and Huang and other AI industry leaders wonder why AI adoption is lagging their expectations?\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI companies need a strong dose of adjacent possible medicine right now. The technology may be moving at breakneck speed, but the general public is not. In tech product planning it\u2019s always better to hit the sweet spot now while building toward a future that may take time to digest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So AI leaders might consider dialing back the revolution and instead focus on turning out products and services today that push us into new territory at a human pace. Map out a journey into the future for us that we can buy into without feeling threatened \u2013 or risk more pushback from the public and, eventually, policymakers.<\/p>\n

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman is upset that many members of the public aren\u2019t thrilled with AI technology. But it\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504802,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,78057,11379,4321,1283,7047,74],"class_list":["post-504801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-disruption","tag-jensen-huang","tag-nvidia","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}