Altman says OpenAI killed Sora and its browser to focus compute on AGI platform
AI寒武纪 · wechat · 2026-08-25
In a nearly 90-minute in-depth interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave a sweeping retrospective on model progress, strategy trade-offs, and the company's early days.
Key disclosures:
- Killing Sora and browser Atlas: OpenAI firmly positions itself as a platform company. Under severe compute and talent constraints, it shut down Sora and its internally praised browser Atlas to concentrate on general intelligence, and is merging ChatGPT with Codex into a unified agent entry point.
- No iPhone moment yet: despite steep capability gains, human and corporate habit inertia slows AI adoption. Altman is skeptical of Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's prediction that 2026 reshapes commerce, and admits he still uses computers the same way he did 20 years ago.
- Peter Thiel saved ChatGPT: two months post-launch, internal doubts nearly led the team to abandon the plain chat form for a list of five or six new directions. Thiel argued the bare text box was the core weapon—like Google's search box—and all effort should go into the model behind it.
- 4.5 years with zero product: the 11 founding members sat in silence in Brockman's apartment in January 2016, without even a whiteboard. Progress metrics like a Dota 2 RL ladder and demos to academic luminaries helped the team find its rhythm, eventually yielding scaling laws.
- Learn from success, not failure: failure postmortems produce vague or wrong conclusions, while success factors are pure and replicable. Frontier research follows venture-style power laws—retain contrarian talent.
- Safety like aviation: doom predictions have been falsified; real-world incremental deployment with transparent incident reviews and rapid guardrail patches beats ivory-tower theorizing.
- Next bottleneck is context and memory: models are smart enough; what limits productivity is their grasp of personal and enterprise background. Altman also slammed elitist narratives of tech oligarchs managing everything, arguing AI must empower ordinary people and will spark a massive small-business boom.
Related event: Sam Altman Explains Why OpenAI Killed Sora and Atlas to Focus on AGI(5 posts)→
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