I’m looking out at Alcatraz Island from a Mediterranean restaurant in San Francisco with hundred-dollar fish entrees on the menu. As I make small talk with other reporters, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumps through the door on my left. Altman’s looking down at his bare iPhone to show us all something, and an intrusive thought slips out of my mouth: “No phone case is a bold choice.”
Of course, I immediately realize that the billionaire CEO of OpenAI, who employs Apple veteran Jony Ive, cares more about preserving the iPhone’s original design than the $1,000 it costs to replace one.
“Listen, we’re going to ship a device that is going to be so beautiful,” said Altman, referring to OpenAI and Ive’s forthcoming AI device. “If you put a case over it, I will personally hunt you down,” he joked.
Altman had gathered roughly a dozen tech reporters to join him and other OpenAI executives for an on-the-record dinner (and off-the-record dessert). The night raised more questions than it answered.
For instance, why is Nick Turley, the VP of ChatGPT, kindly passing me a lamb skewer just a week after launching GPT-5? Was this to make me write nice things about OpenAI’s biggest AI model launch yet, which was relatively disappointing given the years of hype around it?
Unlike GPT-4, which far outpaced rivals and challenged expectations of what AI can do, GPT-5 performs roughly on par with models from Google and Anthropic. OpenAI even brought back GPT-4o, and ChatGPT’s model picker, after several users expressed concerns over GPT-5’s tone and its model router.
But throughout the night, it became clear to me that this dinner was about OpenAI’s future beyond GPT-5. OpenAI’s executives gave the impression that AI model launches are less important than they were when GPT-4 launched in 2023. After all, OpenAI is a very different company now, focused on upending legacy players in search, consumer hardware, and enterprise software.
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OpenAI shared some new details about those efforts.
Altman said OpenAI’s incoming CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, would oversee multiple consumer apps outside of ChatGPT — ones OpenAI has yet to launch. Simo is slated to start work at OpenAI in just a few weeks, and she might end up overseeing the launch of an AI-powered browser that OpenAI is reportedly developing to compete with Chrome.
Altman suggested OpenAI would even consider buying Chrome — likely an offer that would be taken more seriously than Perplexity’s bid — should it become available. “If Chrome is really going to sell, we should take a look at it,” he said, before looking at all of us and asking: “Is it actually going to sell? I assumed it wasn’t gonna happen.”
Simo also might end up running an AI-powered social media app — something the OpenAI CEO said he’s interested in exploring. In fact, Altman says there’s “nothing” inspiring to him about the way AI is used on social media today, adding that he’s interested in “whether or not it is possible to build a much cooler kind of social experience with AI.”
While Turley and Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO, largely gave the floor to Altman, drinking wine alongside the other seated guests, Altman also confirmed reports that OpenAI plans to back a brain-computer interface startup, Merge Labs, to compete with Elon Musk’s Neuralink. (“We have not done that deal yet; I would like us to.”)
How intertwined that company will be with OpenAI’s models and devices remains to be seen. Altman described it only as a “a company that we’d invest in.”
Given all these bets — and others OpenAI is making around data centers, robotics, and energy — Altman clearly has ambitions of running a much bigger company than just the ChatGPT maker. The final form could look something like Google’s parent Alphabet, but perhaps even broader.
In the coming years, it seems likely that OpenAI will go public to meet its massive capital demands. In preparation for that, I think Altman wants to hone his relationship with the media. However, I think OpenAI also wants to get to a place where it’s no longer defined by its best AI model.
