Note

This interview with Sam Altman by Ben Thompson from Stratechery is well worth a read. Lots of great little nuggets from Sam that I haven't heard before and I haven't seen widely picked up by major news outlets.

Here are some snippets:

- GPT-5 is coming soon and will be available on the free tier (I think he's already hinted at this on Twitter)

- Sam believes all models, with the exception of the 'very, very leading edge' will commoditise pretty quickly (i.e. trend to free)

- OpenAI will release more open models going forwards, for the first time since they released GPT-2 in 2019

On OpenAI's future

- Sam sees OpenAI playing in three areas that deliver strategic value:

1. Building a giant (1bn+ user base) consumer internet service. OpenAI are the largest, and fastest growing consumer technology service since Facebook

2. The inference stack. Building out infrastructure for scaling chips, data, and maybe electricity supply (?) do deliver fast, cheaper inference. Essentially delivering more intelligence to people for less

3. Leading AI research. Building the best models and completing the mission to deliver AGI as a net force for good in the world.

On the business model:

- Sam isn't opposed to an advertising model, but would prefer to make money in other ways. I think he sees advertising as a last resort

- He suggests an alternative approach to supplement subscription revenue with affiliate like revenue for e-commerce purchase initiated by ChatGPT

However, the most interesting thing that he talked about, which I find fascinating, is Sam's vision for how he believes OpenAI/ChatGPT will work in the near future:

- He sees people able to take their OpenAI identity, customised model with memory of who you are, and your preferences with you by signing in to other services with your OpenAI account.

- He likened this to how Google currently works - "...people use sign in with Google and people take their Google stuff around the web."

I think this is a really exciting idea, and one I hadn't thought of before. This is AI as a Service (AIaaS - hmm, maybe we need to rethink that acronym 🤣) and now I've heard about it, I'm convinced this is the future of how people will use their own personal AI companion across the web. Love it!

Check out Ben's full interview with Sam here:

It’s well worth a read/listen.