Sam Altman at Italian Tech Week 2024 (Stefano Guidi/Getty Images)

Altman: Artificial general intelligence will arrive during Trump’s time

The OpenAI CEO admitted to moving the goalposts as to what that means, however.

1/6/25 11:58AM

In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reflected on his tumultuous leadership during the young company’s most consequential moments, and shed light on the progress of company’s quest for its Holy Grail: AGI, or artificial general intelligence.

Filling in some details of early OpenAI lore, Altman decided to release the first version of ChatGPT against the advice of his team:

“‘Why are you making us launch this? It’s a bad decision. It’s not ready.’ I don't make a lot of ‘we’re gonna do this thing’ decisions, but this was one of them.”

Altman said he told the team, “I think we have something on our hands that we do not appreciate here.”

Defining exactly what AGI means is slippery, and Altman admits to moving the goalposts.

“Can it start as a computer program and decide it wants to become a doctor? Can it do what the best people in the field can do or the 98th percentile? How autonomous is it? I don’t have deep, precise answers there yet, but if you could hire an AI as a remote employee to be a great software engineer, I think a lot of people would say, ‘OK, that’s AGI-ish.’”

Altman predicted that AGI will be achieved during the new Trump admin, and he didn’t make much of his $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inaugural committee. “He’s the president of the United States. I support any president.”

That said, he did not donate to Biden’s inauguration.

When asked about the potential risks of ChatGPT’s misuse, such as being used to develop bioweapons, Altman wants to move fast and break things:

“I can simultaneously think that these risks are real and also believe that the only way to appropriately address them is to ship product and learn.”

Altman said the company has been working hard with partners like Nvidia to secure enough GPUs for its voracious computing needs, and is working on its own chips as well.

As for powering all these energy-hungry data centers that OpenAI relies on, Altman would prefer to use nuclear fusion, which has yet to be commercialized at scale (though Altman is bullish on his fusion startup, Helion).

Altman’s recent squabbles with OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk have drawn a lot of attention, including Musk’s lawsuits seeking to block OpenAI’s restructuring to a for-profit company.

When asked about the threat of Musk’s newfound power as Trump’s adviser and buddy:

“The question was, will he abuse his political power of being co-president, or whatever he calls himself now, to mess with a business competitor? I don’t think he’ll do that. I genuinely don’t. May turn out to be proven wrong.”

Jon Keegan59m

Google’s AI chip business could be a $900 billion boon for the company

Google may be sitting on a massive new business that it has yet to fully exploit.

Google’s custom tensor processing unit (TPU) AI chips have been getting a lot of attention recently, making the tech world wonder if there are other ways to power its AI dreams rather than just by using Nvidia’s GPUs.

Bloomberg spoke with analysts who estimate that, if it does decide to sell its chips to others, Google could capture 20% of the AI market, making it a $900 billion business. For comparison, Google Cloud pulled in $43.2 billion of revenue last year.

Even if Google just sticks with renting access to its TPUs, it will continue to drive down costs and increase margins as it ekes out performance improvements, such as the 30x improvement in power efficiency that the latest generation of TPUs has delivered for the company.

Alphabet’s AI Chips Are a Potential $900 Billion ‘Secret Sauce’

Rani Molla2h

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has explored bringing his feud with Tesla’s Elon Musk to space

Billionaires, they’re just like us: they want to bring their terrestrial beefs to outer space.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explored buying or partnering with a rocket company to compete with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Wall Street Journal reports. The two billionaires have had numerous public feuds over the years that have played out in the courts and on social media. They also both lead AI companies that have insatiable needs for data centers and have publicly discussed building data centers in space.

Altman seems like he thinks this could be more than science fiction. He reportedly reached out to rocket maker Stoke Space to potentially make equity investments in the company to get a controlling stake, though the talks are no longer active, WSJ reports.

Or perhaps he just wanted a Sherwood bobblehead of himself.

Jon Keegan3h

Report: Meta to slash metaverse, VR spending by up to 30%

Four years after changing its name to reflect its focus on the loosely defined “metaverse,” Meta is planning deep cuts to the company’s money-losing virtual reality efforts, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Meta’s Reality Labs division, home to the teams working on metaverse products — which include Quest VR headsets, Horizon Worlds, and its Ray-Ban Meta glasses — has lost about $70 billion since the company started breaking out the unit in 2020.

The company has struggled to get consumers to buy into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of working and playing in virtual reality worlds, like the company’s Horizon Worlds platform.

Investors seem to love the news of the pivot, as shares shot up as much as 5% in early trading.

Meta’s recent hiring spree of AI superstars from competitors for its Meta Superintelligence Labs shows that the company’s attention is now all in on AI.

Meta’s Zuckerberg Plans Deep Cuts for Metaverse Efforts

The company has struggled to get consumers to buy into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of working and playing in virtual reality worlds, like the company’s Horizon Worlds platform.

Investors seem to love the news of the pivot, as shares shot up as much as 5% in early trading.

Meta’s recent hiring spree of AI superstars from competitors for its Meta Superintelligence Labs shows that the company’s attention is now all in on AI.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Kicks Off Dreamforce With Keynote Presentation

The best quotes from Salesforce’s earnings call

CEO Marc Benioff doesn’t disappoint.

Rani Molla3h

Rani Molla21h

Salesforce jumps as Q3 earnings top expectations

Salesforce jumped after-hours Wednesday as it posted earnings and guidance that beat analysts’ expectations. Its adjusted earnings per share came in at $3.25 for the third quarter of fiscal 2026, above the FactSet analyst consensus estimate of $2.86. Its revenue rose 9% to $10.3 billion, in line with expectations.

The software-as-a-service company issued fourth-quarter revenue guidance of $11.13 billion to $11.23 billion, well above the $10.9 billion analysts had predicted. It also forecast adjusted earnings of $3.02 to $3.04 per share, compared with analysts’ expectations of $3.04.

Shares were up 4.3% in recent trading.

“Our Agentforce and Data 360 products are the momentum drivers,” CEO Marc Benioff said in the press release.

Last quarter, Salesforce shares fell after the company issued disappointing third-quarter guidance. Coming into today’s report, the stock was down about 30% year to date.

Investors will be watching the earnings call closely for updates on the company’s AI strategy — particularly progress on Agentforce and broader adoption of its AI-driven cloud offerings.