OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently gave an extensive interview to Forbes, revealing the company’s succession plan, which includes handing over management to an AI model. Altman believes that if the goal is to develop AGI capable of running companies, his own company should be among the first to try it.
During the interview, Altman stated that OpenAI “essentially already has AGI,” which sparked contradictory comments from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who described Microsoft and OpenAI as “frenemies.” Forbes also reported that Altman holds stakes in over 500 companies, while employees are privately concerned that OpenAI is attempting “too much, too fast.” Altman also commented on his feud with Elon Musk, calling it “incredible how much time he spends on attacks” and criticizing xAI’s safety challenges.
Despite the controversies, Altman continues to dominate the narrative in the AI industry. His statements on AGI and AI succession plans demonstrate his ability to shape the story, while the question remains whether OpenAI can keep up with its leader’s ambitious visions.
In Brief: Tech World Highlights
- South Korean giant Naver released the open-source model HyperCLOVA X Seed Think, a reasoning model with strong agentic capabilities that leads national benchmark tests.
- According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI’s stock-based compensation reached an average of $1.5 million per employee in 2025, the highest in the history of major tech startups.
- Chinese AI lab IQuest Labs unveiled IQuest-Coder-V1, a new family of models that reportedly outperforms competitors such as Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5.1 in programming tests.
- LMArena released its 2025 rankings for leading AI models, with Google’s Gemini 3 Pro leading in text, vision, and search, while Veo 3.1 models ranked best in the video category.
- Chinese AI startup Kimi reportedly raised $500 million in a new Series C round, bringing the company’s valuation to $4.3 billion.
AI Trending Tools:
- GLM-OCR: State-of-the-art model for document understanding and text/image extraction.
- Qwen3-Coder-Next: Alibaba’s open-source hybrid model for agentic coding.
- Ace-Step-1.5: Powerful open-source music generation model by Ace Music.
