OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly teases a "very strong" model internally that can "really accelerate the economy"
OpenAI has reportedly finished pretraining its new AI model, codenamed "Spud," CEO Sam Altman told employees in an internal memo, according to The Information. Altman said the company expects to have a "very strong model" in "a few weeks" that can "really accelerate the economy."
"Things are moving faster than many of us expected," Altman wrote. In a related move, Fidji Simo's product organization is being renamed "AGI Deployment." To free up computing capacity for Spud and other priorities, OpenAI will shut down its video app Sora.
Spud may also serve as the foundation for OpenAI's planned desktop "superapp," which would combine ChatGPT, the coding agent Codex, and the browser Atlas. OpenAI needs to close the gap with Anthropic, which has been gaining significant traction with agent-based AI systems for business customers, particularly through Claude Code. OpenAI's Codex and Frontier are still playing catch-up.
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