My dinner with Altman

This is a column about AI. My boyfriend works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.

Last week, OpenAI reached out to offer an unusual opportunity: a chance to talk with CEO Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives on the record over dinner in San Francisco.

The company has had a tumultuous week. GPT-5, a new family of models introduced into ChatGPT last week, is clearly superior to past OpenAI models at coding, creative writing, and other tasks. It's also notably faster in many cases, and seems to hallucinate less.

At the same time, the launch of the models — and the decision to immediately cut off access to GPT-4o and other predecessors — triggered the largest user backlash in the company's history.

The company has spent the past week reversing many of its initial decisions, restoring access to previous models and increasing rate limits on more compute-intensive reasoning models for paying users. It has also begun to reckon in public with the evidence that some users have developed powerful emotional attachments to their models, suggesting new safety risks that the company has said it will take into account when updating its products in the future.

In any case, I said yes to dinner.

On Thursday evening, I joined nine other reporters at Dalida, a Mediterranean restaurant in San Francisco. Altman was joined by OpenAI's chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap; its head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley; and members of its communications team. Dinner was on the record; executives made some additional off-the-record comments over dessert. For the most part, though, executives answered every question we asked.

(Under our ethics policy, I typically pay for my own expenses related to work events like this. But given the awkwardness of trying to pay for my portion of dinner in this case, I instead donated $200 to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which promotes press freedom and supports journalists under siege.)

I've been to more than my share of tech-related dinners over the years, but none quite like this one. Typically, tech companies only make their CEOs available like this in a strictly off-the-record capacity, if they make them available at all. In that sense, OpenAI's invitation came as a breath of fresh air — even if the company is clearly doing damage control after a rocky launch.

The restaurant was loud, and my phone struggled to pick up some of the conversation. So if the quotes here are shorter than you might expect, it's because I'm relying on the handwritten notes I took as a backup.

In any case, enough preamble — here's what I learned.

On GPT-5

Altman says the company has learned its lesson about abruptly cutting off model access. "I think we definitely screwed some things up in the rollout," he said. The company assumed just about everyone would be happy to get an upgraded model, and didn't consider the parasocial relationship that some segment of its user base had developed with GPT-4o and other models.

But the number of people with intense relationships with individual models is still small, he said. Referring to forums like Reddit's r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, Altman said: "it's a very small percentage of people who are in the parasocial relationships."

He himself is not one of them. Asked whether he experienced any grief over the loss of GPT-4o, he said: "I had not an ounce of that."

OpenAI revenue continues to grow despite the controversy. Revenue from the company's API roughly doubled in the first 48 hours after GPT-5 came out, Altman said.