In a Reddit AMA, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that a lack of compute capacity is one major factor preventing the company from shipping products as often as it’d like.
“All of these models have gotten quite complex,” he wrote in response to a question about why OpenAI’s next AI models were taking so long. “We also face a lot of limitations and hard decisions about we allocated our compute towards many great ideas.”
Many reports suggest that OpenAI has struggled to secure enough compute infrastructure to run and train its generative models. Just this week, Reuters, citing sources, said that OpenAI has for months been working with Broadcom to create an AI chip for running models, which could arrive as soon as 2026.
Partly as a result of strained capacity, Altman said, OpenAI’s realistic-sounding conversational feature for ChatGPT, Advanced Voice Mode, won’t be getting the vision capabilities first teased in April anytime soon. At its April press event, OpenAI showed the ChatGPT app running on a smartphone and responding to visual cues, such as the clothes someone was wearing, within view of the phone’s camera.