STORY: :: June 2, 2025:: San Francisco, California:: Sam Altman says 2026 will be a big year for AI solving problems and making discoveries:: Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI“I think we’ll be at the point next year where you can not only use the system to sort of automate some business processes or fill these new products and services, but you can really say, I have this hugely important problem in my business. I will throw tons of compute at it if you can solve it. And the models will be able to go figure out things that teams of people on their own can’t do.”“I would bet next year that in some limited cases, at least in some small ways, we start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge or can figure out solutions to business problems that are kind of very nontrivial. Right now, it’s very much in the category of, okay, if you got something like repetitive cognitive work, we can automate it at a kind of a low level on a short time horizon.”“So what an enterprise will be able to do, we talked about this a little bit, but just like give it your hardest problem if you’re a chip design company, say go design me a better chip than I could have possibly had before. If you’re a biotech company trying to cure some disease, so just go work on this for me. Like that’s not so far away.”Speaking alongside Conviction founder Sarah Guo and Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, Altman said companies prepared to harness the full potential of AI will experience a “step change” as models evolve from automating routine tasks to tackling non-trivial challenges.“I would bet next year that, at least in some small ways, we start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge,” Altman said, adding that future systems may significantly accelerate scientific discovery.Read More
OpenAI’s Altman sees 2026 as a turning point for AI in business
