An Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman About DevDay and the AI Buildout (stratechery.com)

In a Stratechery interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman framed the recent flurry of announcements around DevDay — including GPT-5, the viral video app Sora, Apps in ChatGPT, Instant Checkout, and major infrastructure deals with Nvidia, AMD, Samsung, Oracle and others — as a single push to build “very capable AI” and deploy it as a unified helper people use across their lives. Altman reiterated that OpenAI is investing heavily in product, research and brutally large-scale infrastructure (power, racks, chip supply) to meet massive demand, and he’s leaning on his investor experience to underwrite and coordinate the parallel investments needed now rather than waiting for sequential builds. Technically and strategically this matters because OpenAI is betting on becoming the primary runtime and identity layer for AI (ChatGPT + apps + API), while outsourcing compute risk through purchase and financing agreements with chip and cloud partners. That amplifies market effects (partner share prices, TSMC capacity pressure) and creates opportunities — and obligations — around supply guarantees, finance structures, and data/continuity integration. For AI/ML practitioners the implications are clear: bigger, centrally provisioned models and platforms, new distribution via ChatGPT apps and APIs, strong demand for optimized model-serving infrastructure, and continued competition (Altman doesn’t see a winner-take-all outcome), all of which will shape tooling, deployment patterns, and where research converts into product.