India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) takes a group photo with AI company leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (C) and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (R) at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026.
Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images
The progress of Chinese tech companies across the entire stack is “remarkable,” OpenAI’s Sam Altman told CNBC, pointing to “many fields” including AI.
Altman’s comments come as China races against the U.S. to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) — where AI matches human capabilities — and roll out the technology across society.
Chinese progress is “amazingly fast,” he said. In some areas Chinese tech companies are near the frontier, while in others they lag behind, Altman added.
OpenAI has been moving to develop revenue streams as its looks to provide a path to profitability for investors that have ploughed around $70 billion into the company, according to deal-counting platform Dealroom. The company is looking to wrap up a $100 billion fundraising round, sources told CNBC.
Adverts within ChatGPT is one avenue the company is exploring.
“I think we still have some work to do to figure out the exact ad format that’s going to work best,” Altman said, adding that plans are in their early stages.
“The ads that I have personally liked the most in recent years from tech [companies] have been sort of Instagram style ads where you discover something new that you might really like and otherwise wouldn’t have known about,” he said. “I think we’ve got a real opportunity to push in that direction with ads in ChatGPT.”
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