BIG TECH

Altman on OpenAI's IPO, jobs, AGI and GPT-6

In one of his most wide-ranging interviews of 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke to business journalist Alex Kantrowitz about AI and jobs, AGI, ChatGPT in the enterprise, GPT-6, AI-first product design, and its massive deals for a $1.4T data center buildout. 

If you don't want to listen to the entire hour-long conversation, I've pulled out the nine most interesting quotes from the interview. Here they are, ranked in order of importance:

1. "I am not a jobs doomer... I think you just don’t bet against evolutionary biology."

2. "That $1.4 trillion we'll spend over a long period of time. I wish we could do it faster." 

3. "We have never yet found a situation where we can't really well monetize all the compute we have. I think if we had double the compute, we'd be at double the revenue right now." 

4. "This was a year where enterprise growth outpaced consumer growth. And given where the models are today and where they'll get to next year, we think this is the time where we can build a really significant enterprise business quite rapidly.

5. "The term [AGI], although it's very hard for all of us to stop using, is very under-defined."

6. "A [possible] definition for superintelligence is when a system can do a better job being President of the United States... than any person can, even with the assistance of AI."

7. "Bolting AI onto the existing way of doing things, I don't think, is going to work as well as redesigning stuff in this AI-first world. It's part of why we wanted to do devices, but it applies at many other levels."

8. "I don't know when we'll call a model GPT-6. But I would expect new models that are significant gains from [GPT] 5.2 in the first quarter of next year."

9. "I'm excited for OpenAI to be a public company in some ways... and in some ways I think it'll be really annoying."

This was a highly substantive conversation, and it was refreshing to see Altman step away from his standard talking points and directly address some of the biggest criticisms aimed at OpenAI right now. Seeing Altman unpack OpenAI's strategy on the company's massive data center commitments, AGI/superintelligence, its enterprise plans, and GPT-6 showed a little bit of method to the madness. Too often, OpenAI has recently looked like it's lurching in countless directions. My favorite part of the interview was when Altman talked about Google. Even when Kantrowitz asked Altman directly about competition with Anthropic, Altman always brought the conversation back to Google. It became clear that, as much as Anthropic is obsessed with OpenAI, OpenAI is obsessed with Google.

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HARDWARE

Data center dollars don't match the hype

The AI data center boom was one of the biggest stories of 2025. But new numbers don't support the narrative — at least not yet. 

A report from S&P Global found that more than $61 billion flowed into the data center market this year, remaining practically flat from the market’s 2024 investments of $60.8 billion. Deal volume fell from 129 deals in 2024 to 104 in 2025, highlighting that the value of these deals is increasing.  

While $61 billion is certainly nothing to scoff at, it’s somewhat nominal when compared to the clusters of deals worth hundreds of billions each, inked by the likes of Oracle, Nvidia, OpenAI and others over the next several years. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are AI data centers, Trevor Morgan, CEO of OpenDrives, told The Deep View.

 “They're building out infrastructure, and that does not happen overnight,” he told me. “When you build out infrastructure like that, that is a long-term play. You're not building for current needs or needs a year from now, you are building out for the next five to 10 years.” 

And AI bubble fears have caused investors and enterprises alike to drop into “wait and see mode,” said Morgan. Additionally, geopolitical uncertainty, supply chain constraints, and energy concerns have made some nervous about throwing their money on the table. Though Morgan said he expects deals to gradually rise over the next 12 to 18 months, for now, “a flat line means that we're still kind of waiting.” 

“They're waiting for AI to really show the value, and ultimately it's going to be predicated on the companies that will leverage these services,” said Morgan.

All roads lead back to the AI bubble. While the data center buildout is largely based on high hopes, enterprises’ need for AI isn’t yet at the exponential growth rate that grounds these investments in reality. And as it stands, skepticism is high, and some cracks in the market are already showing. A bubble-pop moment could still stymie the infrastructure buildout. If that’s what we’re in for, we can only hope it occurs before the ground is broken and the money is actually spent – otherwise, we could see quite the “ripple effect,” Morgan told me.

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HARDWARE

AI firms line up for US govt's 'Genesis Mission'

The US Department of Energy enlisted the support of 24 organizations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft, for its Genesis Mission, an effort to accelerate science, national security, and energy innovation through AI. 

The Trump Administration unveiled the Genesis Mission in late November, likening it to a Manhattan Project for AI. The big names involved seem to signal that all hands are on deck in helping the US outpace China in the global AI arms race.

The past few weeks have been busy for Trump’s AI team:

• The president issued an executive order to limit states’ oversight of AI.

• The administration has been touting its “Tech Force,” an “elite corps of top engineering talent building the future of American government technology.”

• Pete Hegseth’s Department of War rolled out a US military chatbot.

The Genesis Mission initiative builds on the Trump administration’s AI action plan, which called on the DoE, along with other organizations, to monitor the national security implications of frontier models. Involved organizations are expected to contribute in a variety of ways, with Nvidia and Oracle chipping in compute, Microsoft and Google giving cloud infrastructure and AI tools, OpenAI deploying frontier models for scientific research, and Anthropic developing Claude-based tech for national labs.

It’s getting harder to keep track of the Trump administration's various AI initiatives, but this one is important. Some in the US government seem to view staying ahead of China in the AI race as an existential issue. For the various AI firms involved, there is likely a lot of federal contract money on the table, both now and in the future.

LINKS

• Meta's answer to Nano Banana will be called 'Mango'

• Former head of Google's Mandiant launches AI-first cybersecurity team

• AI loan processing startup Salient is now at an ARR of $25 million in two years

• OpenAI's latest fundraising round could value it as high as $830B

• YouTube is shutting down channels using AI to make fake movie trailers

• New AI lab Hark will focus on building 'human-centric AI'

• Mistral OCR-3: State-of-the-art document processing model from Mistral, with an overall 74% win rate. 

• Qwen Image Layered: an open source image layering and decomposition tool by Alibaba. 

• OpenAI Atlas Updates: add multiple browser profiles, import extensions and passwords, and more. 

• Microsoft Trellis.2: An open source image-to-3D model to efficiently create high-fidelity digital assets.

• Microsoft: Language Engineer, Copilot AI

• Cerebro: Research Scientist, RL

• Luma AI: Research Scientist / Engineer – Multimodal Capabilities

• Anthropic: Cross-functional Prompt Engineer

GAMES

A QUICK POLL BEFORE YOU GO