OpenAI Jalapeño design interview transcript

What happened

Their user experience in terms of how fast ChatGPT responds, or how fast Codex responds, or how fast the agents respond — the latency (the delay between asking for something and getting it) really matters. OpenAI revealed its Jalapeño inference (running a trained model to get an answer, rather than training it) ASIC (a chip built for one specific job rather than general use) at Hot Chips in August 2026, a chip that leaned heavily on AI to deliver an incredibly short design window.

This transcript is free to access for a limited time as part of Tom's Hardware Premium's AI Chip Design Week . OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, and its products and services include ChatGPT. Jake Roach, Senior CPU Analyst, Tom's Hardware: It was quite the ending to Hot Chips when you dropped this. Richard Ho, VP Hardware, OpenAI: It is efficiency. It’s something that you can’t do with a third-party silicon merchant really well, because there’s a lot of research IP in the models.