OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he got addicted to this ‘Larry Ellison’s app’; It got ‘too powerful’ for him
Even Sam Altman is not immune to the endless scrolling on TikTok. The OpenAI CEO recently revealed that he forced himself to get “addicted” to TikTok to study its mechanics only to delete the app after finding it “too powerful” to control. Speaking on a recent episode of the Relentless podcast, Altman shared how a research experiment to understand TikTok’s recommendation algorithm quickly spiraled into a personal distraction.“I made myself get addicted to TikTok, because I wanted to just learn. I really thought it was great. “And then I thought I could control it. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s actually kind of fun,’ but I only use it for 10 minutes to wind down before bed, and I’m totally in control of it. And then it was an hour one night. And then some Saturday afternoon, I was on the couch for like three hours,” Altman said.Altman compared the experience to a drug, noting that while he was “really enjoying it in the moment,” he knew the habit was bad for him. After briefly scaling his usage down to a few minutes before bed, he decided to delete the app entirely.“I briefly got it back under control, and I was down to five, 10 minutes a night, whatever, like a little wind down before bed,” he said, adding, “Then I was just like, enough.”
TikTok ownership change in the US
After years of deliberation, TikTok’s US operations are now owned by a majority-investor entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture that includes Larry Ellison’s Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX. The global operations, however, remain tied to ByteDance, which retains a minority 19.9% share in the US venture. Meanwhile, the storage and algorithmic operations in the US are hosted securely on Oracle cloud infrastructure.
The rise and fall of OpenAI’s Sora app
Altman’s deep dive into TikTok coincided with OpenAI’s internal efforts to build its own AI-generated video social media platform, Sora. Despite generating massive hype and securing a partnership with Disney, OpenAI officially scrapped the Sora app project in March after six months of development. Company executives determined that rendering video consumed too much computing power at a time when resources were better spent competing with rivals like Anthropic in the core generative AI race.
