Sam Altman, over bread rolls, explores life after GPT-5

Summary

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. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 OpenAI shared s...