For this week’s TIME100 Most Influential Companies cover story about OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, TIME’s former editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal sat down with a number of company executives in early May, including two sessions with Altman, transcribed below. The conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Edward Felsenthal: What are you using ChatGPT for in your daily life?

Sam Altman: One thing I use it for every day is help with summarization. I can’t really keep up on my inbox anymore, but I made a little thing to help it summarize for me and pull out important stuff from unknown senders, and that’s very helpful. I paste it in there every morning. I used it to translate an article for someone I’m meeting next week, to prepare for that. This is sort of a funny thing, I used it to help me draft a tweet that I was having a hard time with. That was all today.

Were you surprised by how viral the reaction to the launch was?

Not as much as it might have seemed from the outside. We thought it was going to excite people, but the people we spend a lot of time with in our bubble had already gotten pretty excited by the technology. And so in some sense it was like, “Wow, these numbers are going nuts. This is wild to watch.” But I remember a lot of the discussion that first week was, why hadn’t this happened before?

Other AIs had been in the world before.

I think the user experience mattered a lot. It’s not just the UI, it’s the way we tuned the model to have a particular conversational style. It’s very much inspired by texting. I was a huge early adopter and a super user of text messaging.

What will the interface look like as the technology integrates more deeply into our lives?

You’ll be able to do this with two-way voice , and it’ll feel real time. You’ll be able to talk like two people doing conversations, and that’ll be powerful. You can [eventually] imagine a world where, as you are talking, it’s like the Star Trek holodeck. But I think the thing that will matter most is how much of the stuff you want to happen can happen from a relatively small amount of conversation. As these models get to know you better and are capable of more, you can really imagine a world where you have a fairly simple and short conversation with the model, and a huge amount of things get done on your behalf.

And is that through our phone or is it everywhere?

I think it’s everywhere, all at once. Now people are still in the phase where they’re saying, “I’m an AI company.” But pretty soon we’ll just expect all the products and services we use to have some intelligence baked in, and it’ll just be expected like a mobile app is today.

You’ve described this technology as both the greatest threat to the human existence and the greatest potential advancement for humanity.

Definitely one of the confusing parts of this technology is just the overall power—the good, the potential bad. I think we can do a lot to maximize the good and manage and mitigate the bad, but the scary part is just sort of putting this lever into the world will for sure have unpredictable consequences. The exciting parts are almost too long to list, but I think this is transforming the way people do their work. It’s transforming the way people learn. It’s going to transform the way people interact with the world. In a deep sense, AI is the technology that the world, that people have always wanted. Sci-Fi has been talking about this for a very long time.

Thinking about it as a parent, one of the things that seems scary is, how do we know our kids are really our kids. You get a call, “I need money, I need help.”

That’s going to be a real problem and a real problem soon. It’s not just as parents, it’s thinking about our own parents who are already disproportionately victims of these ransom phone calls. I think we just all need to start telling people this is coming. You can’t trust a voice you hear over the phone anymore. And society is capable of adapting, as people are much smarter and savvier than I think a lot of the so-called experts think.

Do I need a code word with my kid?

I think it’ll be a stack of many solutions. People will use code words they’ll verify over video. That’ll work for a while. There will be technology solutions that help. People will exchange cryptographic keys and many other ideas too. We’ll just need a combination of technical and social solutions to operate in a different way. I am worried, but we will adapt. We’re good at this. We as a society.

Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Haidt argue that AI will make our problems with social media worse. Are you worried about that?

I think social media is in such a volatile place right now that I’m of course nervous about it. I can see a bunch of ways that AI makes it better too. I think these things are just hard to predict.