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OpenAI CEO reduces childhood to a power bill

Sam Altman on the meaning of life is pretty rough.

Jason Weisberger
Feb 21, 2026
∙ Paid

On again off again OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who famously claimed he could not raise a child without AI, now sums up the meaning of life as the carbon footprint of training an LLM. Altman compared 20 years of growth, learning, scraped knees, and bedtime stories to the electricity bill for training a large language model, concluding that people are basicall…

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