Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Sam Altman believes the biggest current return in AI development comes from creative software ideas that extract more intelligence from existing compute units. He also mentioned that OpenAI's Hallopine project and future successors will be a significant competitive advantage, and anticipates advancements like optical computing in the future.
“I think probably the biggest return right now is creative software ideas to sort of squeeze more intelligence out of the units of compute that we have.”
“And my sense is there are orders of magnitude to go there.”
“Hallopine and its successors are going to be a huge competitive advantage for us from that perspective.”