Sam Altman says OpenAI will point its robots at building data centres

What happened

He spoke to Stripe co-founder John Collison on Collison’s podcast, Cheeky Pint, released on Thursday. OpenAI will point its robotics programme at building data centres (a building full of computers that runs online services), chief executive Sam Altman said. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.

Self-replicating data centres, built with AI-controlled robots, are “within grasp”, he said. He also said sandboxes work only ‘to a point’ against AI far smarter than people.

The episode is on YouTube , and Cheeky Pint published a full transcript on Substack.

Altman also talked about AI finding software flaws, and about the limits of sandboxes for models far smarter than people. Robots, chips and data centres Asked how the compute shortage is going, Altman said demand for capable models at a low price “only goes one way”.

OpenAI has made its own chip , which he said performs well on intelligence per watt. It is also learning to build its own data centres , he said.

“People talk a lot about RSI as an AI that does AI research. There’s very little, relatively little talk about self-replicating data centers,” Altman said. RSI stands for recursive self-improvement, the idea of AI improving itself.