Three and a half years after ChatGPT brought artificial intelligence into the mainstream world, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki published a blog post on Monday announcing that the company has officially entered its "third phase." Altman divides OpenAI’s journey into three phases: The first phase focused on general artificial intelligence (AGI) research; the second phase involved bringing products to market to observe how people truly use AI; and now entering the third phase—where “the economy begins to reshape around AI”—with the core question being “how to make advanced AI enriching, cheap, safe, useful, and easy enough to use so that every individual and organization can benefit.” “Cutting-edge capabilities are just part of the job,” Altman and Pachocki wrote. “The bigger challenge is turning these capabilities into tools that people can genuinely use to live better lives.” They proposed three core objectives: 1. Build automated AI researchers 2. Accelerate economic growth 3. Equip everyone on Earth with their own personal AGI Beyond technical ambitions, the blog post devoted significant space to emphasizing safety and governance. “Powerful systems must remain safe, aligned with human intent, and under human control,” they wrote. “A future where everything is fully automated is not what we want—it would neither be fulfilling nor safe. AI should help people achieve goals rather than drift away from them.” They also called for coordination mechanisms at national and global levels, reiterating proposals for an international body to mitigate AI risks, even suggesting slowing down frontier model development if necessary. “A good AI future cannot be one in which a few institutions hold most of the capability and rewards. It should be a future where more individuals, companies, communities, and nations have the power to build, benefit, and wield influence.” Ironically—at a time when OpenAI secretly filed an initial public offering application on the same day (though the company stated listing was still some way off)—and as Anthropic researchers last week noted that “frontier labs may need to slow down” both prospective publicly traded companies coincidentally chose to send signals to “slow down” on the eve of going public. Perhaps the true “third phase” has only just begun.