State of the AI Industry — the OpenAI Podcast Ep. 12

Hello, I'm Andrew Mayne, and this is the OpenAI Podcast. Today, our guests are Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, and legendary investor, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. In this discussion, we're going to talk about the state of the AI ecosystem, whether or not we're in a bubble, and how startups and investors can succeed as AI progresses.

Unlike something like Netflix, where they're running so many hours in the day, I think of it much more like infrastructure, like electricity.

Demand is limited, not by anything other than availability of compute today. I think the conversation we need to have is: what will people do?

2025 was about agents and vibe coding. Now it's 2026. What's the story of 2026?

I think we matured in vibe coding in 2025. I don't think we've matured in agents. So agents, especially multi-agentic systems, will mature to the point of having real visible impact. Whether you're an enterprise and you have a multi-agent systems doing full tasks, like running an ERP system for you, um, you know, doing all the reconciliation every day, accruals every day, work-- tracking contracts every day. I think that on the enterprise side. But today, uh, on the consumer side, you know, it's still a hassle to ma-- plan a trip. That's a multi-agentic thing that looks across a lot of different things, from your food preferences, to the restaurant reservation, to airline schedules, to your personal calendar. Uh, those will start to mature, I think, a year from now. Um, so I'm pretty excited about that. I think models in robotics and real-world models that go beyond, well beyond robotics, like general intuition, uh, will all start to happen in, in the next year. So I think that, that-- those are areas to look for. There's usual functions, like memory in LLMs, um, continual learning in LLMs, um, redu- uh, reduction of the impact of hallucinations. Those are all areas I could go on. There's half a dozen areas in which AI doesn't do as well today that will be-- start to be addressed.

Yeah. And I think at its baseline, what Vinod is saying is '26 is the beginning of closing this capability gap. So what we know is we've handed people massive intelligence, right? We've handed them the keys to the Ferrari, but they are only learning how to take it out on the road for the first time. Um, we need to give consumers more and more easy ask, uh, easy ways to go from ChatGPT as just a chatbot, call and response. Most people use it today just to ask questions. But how do we take it towards being a true task worker, that, that books that trip for them, or helps them get a second opinion on what they just heard from their doctor, or enables them to create a menu for their diabetic child, right? How do we help them really move from simple questions into actual outcomes that make my life better? And then on the enterprise side, it's that same continuum. How do we close the capability gap, right? One of the things we know from our state of the enterprise, AI and the enterprise report that our chief economist put out at the end of last year, is on the frontier versus just even the median corporation. The, the average number of messages or the median is about six X, which will tell you that's six X the usage from a company that's already on the frontier, and we know that frontier isn't even pushed to its max. So for us, it's this focus of how do we help consumers move along that continuum to true agentic task working? And then for enterprises, how do we create a much more sophisticated, vertically specialized outcome for enterprises that allows them to go from maybe a very simple ChatGPT implementation, the whole way to something that's transforming the most important part of their business? For a healthcare provider, it might be their drug discovery process. For a hospital, it might be the time to admit a patient to get that patient back into the community. For, um, a really large retailer, it might be just larger basket sizes, higher conversion rates, and much happier customers. So it's the basics of closing that capability gap.