On Thursday, I had dinner with Sam Altman, 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. It’s uncommon to have such an extended, wide-ranging interview with a major tech CEO over a meal. But there’s 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’s 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. But first, he’s focused on the response to last week’s rollout of GPT-5. About an hour before the dinner started, OpenAI pushed an update to bring back the “warmth” 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. “I think we totally screwed up some things on the rollout,” he said. “On the other hand, our API traffic doubled in 48 hours and is growing. We’re 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’ve learned a lesson about what it means to upgrade a product for hundreds of millions of people in one day.”

Full interview : Sam Altman says OpenAI “totally screwed up some things” on the GPT-5 rollout and confirms plans to fund a brain-computer interface startup to rival Neuralink.