{"id":148185,"date":"2025-08-15T15:57:22","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T15:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/148185\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T15:57:22","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T15:57:22","slug":"i-talked-to-sam-altman-about-the-gpt-5-launch-fiasco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/148185\/","title":{"rendered":"I talked to Sam Altman about the GPT-5 launch fiasco"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, I had dinner with Sam Altman<\/strong>, a few other OpenAI executives, and a small group of reporters in San Francisco. Altman answered our questions for hours. No topic was off limits, and everything, with the exception of what was said over dessert, was on the record.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s uncommon to have such an extended, wide-ranging interview with a major tech CEO over a meal. But there\u2019s nothing common about the situation Altman finds himself in. ChatGPT has quickly become one of the most widely used, influential products on earth. Now, Altman is plotting an aggressive expansion into consumer hardware, brain-computer interfaces, and social media. He\u2019s interested in buying Chrome if the US government forces Google to sell it. Oh, and he wants to raise trillions of dollars to build data centers.<\/p>\n

But first, he\u2019s focused on the response to last week\u2019s rollout of GPT-5. About an hour before the dinner started, OpenAI pushed an update to bring back the \u201cwarmth\u201d of 4o, its previous default model for ChatGPT. It was Altman who made the call to quickly bring back 4o as an option for paying subscribers after some protested its disappearance on Reddit and X.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we totally screwed up some things on the rollout,\u201d he said. \u201cOn the other hand, our API traffic doubled in 48 hours and is growing. We\u2019re out of GPUs. ChatGPT has been hitting a new high of users every day. A lot of users really do love the model switcher. I think we\u2019ve learned a lesson about what it means to upgrade a product for hundreds of millions of people in one day.\u201d<\/p>\n

He pegged the percentage of ChatGPT users who have unhealthy relationships with the product at \u201cway under 1 percent,\u201d but acknowledged that OpenAI employees are having \u201ca lot\u201d of meetings about the topic. \u201cThere are the people who actually felt like they had a relationship with ChatGPT, and those people we\u2019ve been aware of and thinking about. And then there are hundreds of millions of other people who don\u2019t have a parasocial relationship with ChatGPT, but did get very used to the fact that it responded to them in a certain way, and would validate certain things, and would be supportive in certain ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou will definitely see some companies go make Japanese anime sex bots because they think that they\u2019ve identified something here that works,\u201d he said in a not-so-subtle dig at Grok. \u201cYou will not see us do that. We will continue to work hard at making a useful app, and we will try to let users use it the way they want, but not so much that people who have really fragile mental states get exploited accidentally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Altman wants ChatGPT to feel as personal as possible but not necessarily play to a specific ideology or political view. \u201dI don\u2019t think our products should be woke. I don\u2019t think they should be whatever the opposite of that is, either. I think our product should have a fairly center of the road, middle stance, and then you should be able to push it pretty far. If you\u2019re like, \u2018I want you to be super woke,\u2019 it should be super woke. And if you\u2019re like, \u2018I want you to be conservative,\u2019 it should reflect you.\u201d<\/p>\n

ChatGPT has roughly quadrupled its user base in a year and is now reaching over 700 million people each week. \u201cPretty soon, billions of people a day will be talking to ChatGPT,\u201d Altman said. \u201cWe\u2019re the fifth biggest website in the world right now. I think we\u2019re on the clear path to the third.\u201d (That means beating Instagram and Facebook.) \u201cThen it gets harder. For ChatGPT to be bigger than Google, that\u2019s really hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

For its operation to keep scaling, OpenAI needs a lot more GPUs. This is one of Altman\u2019s top priorities. \u201cYou should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,\u201d he confidently told the room.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to make these horrible trade-offs right now,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have better models, and we just can\u2019t offer them because we don\u2019t have the capacity. We have other kinds of new products and services we\u2019d love to offer.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also thinks we\u2019re in an AI bubble. \u201cWhen bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,\u201d he explained. \u201cIf you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

He confirmed recent reports<\/a> that OpenAI is planning to fund a brain-computer interface startup to rival Elon Musk\u2019s <\/strong>Neuralink. \u201cI think neural interfaces are cool ideas to explore. I would like to be able to think something and have ChatGPT respond to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does Fidji Simo<\/strong> joining OpenAI<\/a> to run \u201capplications\u201d imply there will be other standalone apps besides ChatGPT? \u201cYes, you should expect that from us.\u201d He hinted at his social media ambitions<\/a>: \u201cI am interested in whether or not it is possible to build a much cooler kind of social experience with AI.\u201d He also said, \u201cIf Chrome is really going to sell, we should take a look at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Altman has a lot of interests, it\u2019s not actually clear that running OpenAI over the long run is one of them. \u201cI\u2019m not a naturally well-suited person to be a public company CEO,\u201d he said at one point. \u201cCan you imagine me on an earnings call?\u201d<\/p>\n

I then asked if he would be CEO in a few years. \u201cI mean, maybe an AI is in three years. That\u2019s a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here are some other things Altman said:<\/p>\n