Today’s Stratechery Interview is with OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. I have interviewed Altman twice before, first in 2023 with Microsoft’s Kevin Scott, and again earlier this year; while OpenAI is not a public company, I am, just as I did previously, treating this like a public company CEO interview, which means this transcript is publicly available. I actually was pretty surprised to realize it has only been seven months since I last talked to Altman; since then OpenAI has unveiled GPT-5, launched the viral AI video app Sora, and made a slew of announcements about a massive AI buildout with a variety of partners, from Nvidia to AMD to Samsung to Oracle and more. The occasion for this interview, however, was Monday’s DevDay keynote, where Altman and OpenAI launched a number of new initiatives, including Apps in ChatGPT. In this interview, which was limited to 40 minutes or so, I did my best to cover the entire gamut: we discuss all of those infrastructure announcements, why Altman’s investor skills are particularly useful as CEO, apps in ChatGPT and Instant Checkout, Sora, and how the company thinks about user feedback. What is particularly notable, in my estimation, is the extent to which Altman and OpenAI are presenting an increasingly coherent vision about what OpenAI is building towards, which very well may be all of our future.

Full interview : Sam Altman answers question on OpenAI’s unifying vision, infrastructure deals, the investor mindset, ChatGPT apps, Instant Checkout, Sora, copyright, feedback, and more.