Altman’s comments about GPT-6 follow a rocky rollout of GPT-5. Users took to social media to complain about the model being colder, less connected and less helpful than the prior version.

“I like the new one much better,” he said, acknowledging that the rollout was mishandled. He noted that OpenAI quietly pushed a tone update to GPT-5 that’s “much warmer.”

While Altman called enhanced memory his favorite feature launched this year, he said there are privacy concerns,particularly because temporary memory isn’t encrypted. That means sensitive information could potentially be exposed without stronger safeguards. Altman confirmed that encryption “very well could be” added, though there’s no timeline yet.

Queries involving legal or medical information, he said, need to be treated with adequate privacy protections that aren’t in place today.

“It’s in society’s interest for people to get good medical advice … good legal advice,” he said. “And if you can get better versions of those from AI, you ought to be able to have the same protection for the same reason we decided you could get them from a doctor or a lawyer.”

He’s looking to the future and brain-computer interfaces. Altman said he finds “neural interfaces a cool idea” and imagines being able to “think something and have ChatGPT respond.”

“There are a few areas adjacent to AI that I think are worth us doing something, and this is one of them,” he said, adding that he’s also interested in energy, novel substrates, robots and faster ways to build data centers.

For now, OpenAI’s core consumer product remains ChatGPT, and Altman said he’s focused on making it more flexible and more useful in daily life. He said he already relies on it for everything from work to parenting questions.

He said, however, that there are limits.

“The models have already saturated the chat use case,” Altman said. “They’re not going to get much better. ... And maybe they’re going to get worse.”