Building Samantha – A New Paradigm for AI

Let's find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.

We live in a society that is very much focused on "progress". For companies, this means maximizing revenue and trying to reach a specific goal in the future. In the leading field of AI development, it means developing a superintelligent AI system that can replace human labor at scale, deter military opponents, and be an intimately personal assistant to millions of people like Samantha in the movie “Her”. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said the movie was “prophetic” and we know that building a Samantha-like entity was on the company’s roadmap for the first half of 2025.

During the remedies phase of Google’s antitrust trial with the Department of Justice (DOJ), Google subpoenaed three of its biggest rivals in AI-powered search – OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft - in an attempt to obtain documents that would show the judge it faces competition in the search industry.

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In this context, a heavily redacted version of an internal strategy document from OpenAI titled “ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy” revealed that ChatGPT’s mission “is to introduce the whole world to an intuitive AI super assistant that deeply understands you and is your interface to the internet”.

In support of Google’s antitrust arguments, the document also reveals that OpenAI sees competition in the consumer AI space from Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Meta AI – obviously - but also from search engines, browsers, and “even physical interactions”. That is because OpenAI wants to build, not only the most advanced AI chatbot but a new access point and interface to the web.

We can recognize this strategy in the company’s steady drum of product releases. A memory feature for ChatGPT was rolled out last year that enables the chatbot to remember conversations across chat logs. In January 2025, the company released a research preview of its first agent “Operator” that can autonomously take actions on a web browser under the guidance of a user. Then there’s the mysterious collaboration with Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ivy on a new AI consumer device.

In this week’s post, we will see how research and work by the leading AI labs are leading us to a new paradigm for AI that could potentially scale to a Samantha-like superhuman intelligence.