Over wine and lamb skewers in San Francisco this weekend, Sam Altman sketched out a vision that makes GPT-5 and the entire GPT series look more like a pit stop than the finish line.
The kicker? Altman says the AI device gadget OpenAI and Jony Ive are working on is so stunning that putting a case on it is basically a crime—one he’d personally come after you for.
And while we were bracing for some juicy details on GPT-5’s rocky debut, this wasn’t exactly a “let’s talk about GPT-5” gathering. If anything, GPT-5 was the awkward plus-one everyone tried to ignore.
Still, Altman admitted they botched things by axing GPT-4o too abruptly, promised smoother handoffs next time, and said GPT-5 is already being fine-tuned to sound warmer and less robot-cold.
But hey, the real energy of the night was about what comes after GPT-5. And Here’s what we learned:
New apps incoming — Remember ex-Meta exec Fidji Simo (also Instacart’s CEO)? She’s coming on board to lead fresh consumer products beyond ChatGPT. Think: an AI browser to take on Chrome, maybe even a whole new social network. And yep, Altman joked about buying Chrome—though let’s be honest, if it ever went up for sale, OpenAI would lunge faster than Perplexity could refresh its homepage.
Hardware dreams: That hush-hush Jony Ive–Altman device? Totally real. And according to Altman, it’s not just AI in your pocket—it’s designed to be the heart of your digital life.
Sci-fi frontiers: Altman also dropped that OpenAI’s eyeing brain-computer startups to go head-to-head with Neuralink, which is cool but let’s be honest—the real show will be watching him tango with Elon.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s growth is insane. Even with GPT-5’s rocky debut, API usage doubled in just 48 hours, coding tools like Cursor made GPT-5 their default, and demand got so wild they basically ran out of GPUs.
So what’s the play here? Altman’s clearly positioning OpenAI as something way bigger than just “the ChatGPT company.” Think Alphabet-scale empire with search, hardware, enterprise, data centers — maybe even social platforms and brain chips — all under one umbrella.
In short: GPT-5 (and the entire GPT series, really) is just a chapter. The endgame is OpenAI outgrowing its chatbot roots and reinventing the tech game altogether. It’s so clear that Altman’s gunning for nothing less than the crown of biggest tech giant for the coming decades.
