From hallucinating AI chatbots to wiping out humanity: How did we get here?

From hallucinating AI chatbots to wiping out humanity: How did we get here? Sam Altman, chief executive officer and co-founder of OpenAI, speaks during the 2026 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. The heads of leading U.S. artificial intelligence labs came together in a rare show of unity over the weekend to slow the technology's development, warning it could soon improve on its own and slip beyond human control. The remarks, from fierce business rivals such as Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk, show how quickly AI has advanced, from the hallucination-prone ChatGPT of 2022 toward what many see as a critical milestone: recursive self-improvement (RSI). Central to the field is the idea that an AI system could become capable of improving itself, with little to no help from humans, and allowing each advance to help produce the next one.