Santa Barbara native and former OpenAI alum Zack Kass embraces the future of AI
A growing number of Americans have expressed concerns over the years about the role artificial intelligence will play in their lives.
According to Reuters, 71% of Americans were concerned that AI would replace jobs. A Pew Research Center survey found similar results and added that 58% of Americans in general are scared of how AI will affect every facet of their lives.
One person who is not scared about the future AI will play in our future is Zack Kass. The former Go-To-Market at OpenAI is one of the big optimists that AI can improve a lot of the issues the world faces today, though even he admits, it hasn’t been shared that way.
Kass spoke for nearly two hours in front of a packed crowd at the Granada Theatre on Jan. 20 for his event, The Next RenAIssance, also the title of his new book released Jan. 13, to try to give people “an opportunity to consider a future that maybe they haven’t.”
“I’m doing it on behalf of the industry that has done a pretty bad job of explaining itself. I recognize that the people building this technology don’t often consider what it sounds like when they talk about it and it’s not because they’re misintentioned. It is because it is very hard to both build frontier technology and explain it to 8 billion people and so tonight, I will try to do that,” Kass said.
Kass, who has spent 16 years working at the forefront of the AI industry, began the night detailing his time at OpenAI. During his tenure there, the San Francisco-based company, which has an approximate valuation of about $830 million today, launched ChatGPT.
Months before the November 2022 launch, Kass recalled OpenAI launching GPT3, something “no one was using.”
“GPT3 didn’t actually matter because it was too expensive, it was really slow, and it actually wasn’t that good,” he said.
So when ChatGPT launched, it launched as a web application, giving everyday people the chance to see “how cool this was and show CEOs what they could do with it.”
When it was first launched, ChatGPT had about 1 million users within its first week. By late 2025, ChatGPT reached about 800 million weekly users.
“What happened, of course, was that OpenAI built the most popular consumer product ever,” Kass said.
Kass said the next big step the AI industry will take over the next 10 years is agentic agents, or autonomous AI systems that can plan and act independently to achieve goals set by humans, unlike traditional AI that follows step-by-step commands.
Kass argued that humans simply make too many choices in the current day. He said, on average, a person makes 125 purchase decisions a day.
“That is about 124 more than our great-grandparents. We were never supposed to make this many purchase decisions,” Kass said.
He argued that the vast majority of people do not care about the majority of decisions they make. He said, for example, if giving a shopping list to an agentic agent, he would ask for four specific things and the rest could be filled up however the AI chose.
“People are going to discover they have far fewer preferences than they actually had,” Kass said.
Kass also tried to address a lot of people’s biggest concerns about AI.
He used the example of autonomous vehicles, which he noted have an approval rating of about 35%. He said, despite the fact that autonomous vehicles have gotten a lot better in the last couple of years, people’s fears of giving up control is ultimately holding back mass adoption.
“45,000 Americans die every year on the roadways as a result of human error. 1.3 million people globally die every year as a result of human error on the roadways. But that’s not how we talk about autonomous vehicles; no one talks about all the lives we could save,” Kass said.
He added that AI and technology are improving so rapidly that people simply cannot fathom that the technology that exists today is even better than just one month ago.
“We’re building science too fast now; it’s gotten too good, too fast for anyone to make sense of it. So the next time someone says if something is better or worse, just know that answer changes on a day-to-day basis,” Kass said.
In regard to dehumanization, or the idea that AI will make people less human, Kass argued that current social media and internet implementation has already done more damage than AI could do. He argues even that AI could help decrease the time on social media, as there will be no need to use the internet. The internet would be autonomous agents talking to each other and people would be free to live their lives.
In regard to job displacement, Kass argued that people might not be so worried about losing their job, but rather the identity they have tied to that job. In his book, he interviewed a slew of Longshoremen after the strike of 2024, in which labor heads were not fighting for higher wages or more jobs, but rather that their jobs would not be automated.
When interviewing them, he found that most Longshoremen were people who came from a long line of people who were also Longshoremen.
“It was not an economic issue. The signs they wrote read, robots don’t pay taxes, and automation harms families. But they might as well have read, this is my identity,” Kass said.
“One of the questions that we also asked was, who benefits economically if we automate the ports? Their reflexive answer was capitalists and that’s a fine answer. But it would also benefit everyone. And the only reason I know that is because we are all descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our economic benefit, and we never think twice about it. We never consider the fact that one of our ancestors lost their job so that our life could be a little bit better, and so on and so on.”
His ultimate argument was that people’s self-identity being tied to their jobs is ultimately what could be the biggest hurdle.
Kass also spoke on other topics, but his main point on mass AI adoption was that it was necessary to solve some of the world’s biggest issues — housing, healthcare, food and water costs.
“If we want to build a better world, we have to start talking about it, not because we don’t have problems, but because we must build solutions,” Kass said.
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