Imagine that these prompts are not triggered by humans anymore, but by the AI invoking itself.

Sam Altman takes comfort in the thought that their AI does nothing without a human prompting it, so it has a human in the loop, as a circuit breaker if you will.

This assumption is rapidly becoming a mere hope, as right now probably hundreds of developers are working on systems which, when put into production and connected to other systems, might just come down to: the AI is calling itself, and giving itself orders.