While some of those features, announced at OpenAI\u2019s demo day in San Francisco last week, are rolling out gradually, the plan is coming into focus: to collapse the chaos of the web, with its limitless pages, into a single interface.<\/p>\n
Marc Andreessen, the famed billionaire tech investor, famously wrote at the dawn of the social media era that \u201csoftware is eating the world\u201d. Altman? He appears to be trying to eat the entire internet, by turning ChatGPT into the \u201ceverything app\u201d to rule them all \u2014 a singular tool that people can turn to as their personal assistant, travel agent, confidant, legal adviser, doctor and personal shopper.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Silicon Valley\u2019s AI-fuelled madness has echoes of the dotcom crash<\/a><\/p>\n The 40-year-old\u2019s quest is both wildly ambitious and, at its heart, quite simple. \u201cMost people will want to have one AI service, and that needs to be useful to them across their whole life,\u201d he said last week to Ben Thompson of the technology site Stratechery. \u201cI do feel like this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all of us and we\u2019ll take the run at it.\u201d<\/p>\n ChatGPT is now used by more than 800 million people each week, and it was launched only just under three years ago in November 2022. Despite OpenAI\u2019s internal projections that it will burn through $115 billion (\u00a385 billion) in cash between now and 2029, such is the pace of its growth that a recent share sale valued the company at $500 billion<\/a> \u2014 35 times its value just three years ago.<\/p>\n Stratechery\u2019s Thompson posited that Altman is apeing Bill Gates by turning ChatGPT into the dominant \u201coperating system\u201d of this new age. \u201cOpenAI is making a play to be the Windows of AI,\u201d Thompson said. At its height, Windows was used on more than 80 per cent of the world\u2019s personal computers.<\/p>\n Underlying Altman\u2019s blitz is what former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has dubbed the \u201cSan Francisco consensus\u201d: the belief that OpenAI, and a handful of rivals, will very soon create artificial general intelligence (AGI), or \u201csuperintelligence\u201d \u2014 AI tools that are better than humans at all cognitive work. <\/p>\n Altman poses with OpenAI\u2019s president Greg Brockman and Nvidia\u2019s Jensen Huang on the day of the announcement of the $500 billion tie-up with the chipmaker<\/p>\n NVIDIA<\/p>\n Under this vision, \u201cagents\u201d \u2014 autonomous AI applications that do things on your behalf \u2014 would spring up by the billions, doing in seconds what humans might do in hours or days, and for a fraction of the cost. Everyone would suddenly be endowed, in effect, with a personal AI workforce marshalled by a preferred chatbot, diverting money away from the humans whom you might once have paid for that work.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you have a couple of entities that actually crack AGI, these entities will make more profit than anything we\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Alex Blania, chief executive of World, the digital identity start-up founded by Altman six years ago, told The Sunday Times in 2023. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about a significant percentage of global GDP [gross domestic product].\u201d<\/p>\n That belief, both in the power of the technology and the size of the opportunity, is why the AI bubble has been inflated so quickly. It is why Thinking Machines Lab \u2014 a revenue-free start-up, launched by OpenAI co-founder Mira Murati, that launched its first product just days ago \u2014 can be valued at $12 billion. Ruchir Sharma, a writer and investor at the equity research firm Rockefeller International, recently estimated that 40 per cent of America\u2019s GDP growth this year was due to AI spending.<\/p>\n \u2022 OpenAI\u2019s former tech boss Mira Murati launches own start-up<\/a><\/p>\n For Altman, the tip of the spear is forging the world\u2019s dominant AI super-app. \u201cWe\u2019ve gone from people\u2019s entire world [being] social media, which was pretty awful but at least there was a chance of diversity,\u201d said Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Information at the University of California. <\/p>\n \u201cThe thing about these large language models [the basis for the likes of ChatGPT] is that there are going to be a relatively small number of winners, because you need massive computing, massive data, massive infrastructure. Your entire online existence is going to be funnelled through, essentially, four or five billionaires who control the key players. I worry about that consolidation of power. I think it\u2019s dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n The notion of \u201csuper-apps\u201d is not new. WeChat, in China, is indispensable; people rely on it to make calls, shop, hail cabs, pay bills, read news and play games. There is no such app in the West, where antitrust regulation and fierce competition have kept any one company from consolidating power to that degree.<\/p>\n Video-creation app Sora is being touted as a challenger to TikTok<\/p>\n SAMUEL BOIVIN\/SHUTTERSTOCK<\/p>\n What makes this moment different is the nature of AI itself. It is human-like \u2014 a conversational engine inviting intimacy and trust; that one of the prime-use cases of these systems is therapy speaks to just how different the technology is from what has come before. And AI is also already better than most non-specialists at most things. <\/p>\n![\"OpenAI](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/ef413654-10b1-4e31-a470-ae508ef978b3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Sora](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/8352f40a-82ca-41e2-9f85-91716b02a4fc.jpg\")
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