I’m looking out at Alcatraz Island from a Mediterranean restaurant in San Francisco with hundred-dollar fish entrées 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,” says Altman, referring to OpenAI and Ive’s forthcoming AI device. “If you put a case over it, I will personally hunt you down,” he jokes.
Altman has 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 raises more questions than it answers.
For instance, why is Nick Turley, the VP of ChatGPT, kindly passing me a lamb skewer just a week after launching GPT-5? Is this to encourage me to 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 becomes clear to me that this dinner is about OpenAI’s future beyond GPT-5. OpenAI’s executives give 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, focu …