ChatGPT 2026

Sam Altman's vision is clear: A personalized, pervasive, proactive superintelligence that acts as your life's operating system

You wake up and pick up your phone, just out of habit. A few notifications blink back, but as usual these days, nothing urgent. Overnight, a colleague had asked for a document; your AI tracked it down across your cloud drives, confirmed it was the right version, and sent it with a short note. You take a breath. No fires to put out. You start the day with a clear mind.

As you dress, your AI delivers a personalized daily update. It starts with news—not headlines, but relevant trends and analysis, like observations related to strategy for a project you’re working on. It nudges you to check in on someone close to you, based solely on a shift in their tone yesterday. It flags a local event you’d enjoy, and even proposes a time and friend to go with, based on your recent mood, schedule, and shared interests.

You didn’t ask. You didn’t tap. It simply knows you—like your priorities, patterns, plans, and the people you care about. It doesn’t wait to be instructed. It has all of your context and connects to all of your apps. And it’s not science fiction. It’s Sam Altman’s vision for ChatGPT by 2026: a personalized, pervasive, and proactive operating system for your life whose pieces are falling into place

The path ahead

One thing I notice about OpenAI and its people, including Sam Altman, is that they often hint at upcoming products and features in interviews and Q&As. Having read and listened to Sam Altman’s recent ones, here’s what’s planned for ChatGPT to realize the scenario above:

Smarter brain

ChatGPT will move from general competence to superhuman intelligence. Altman expects that by the end of this year, we’ll have models that can act as capable agents, and by next year, models that can make new discoveries. He thinks that GPT-5, coming in the next few months, will be smarter than most users.

Infinite memory

ChatGPT won’t just remember a few past chats. It will remember your life. Emails, documents, past conversations, long-term goals—all woven into one seamless context. Altman describes the ideal as a "very tiny reasoning model with a trillion tokens of context" that holds everything you’ve ever read, written, or said.

This memory won't just be long—it will be smart. ChatGPT will recall what matters, ignore what doesn’t, and do it all within user-defined boundaries.

Portable identity

You won’t just use ChatGPT in a browser. You’ll bring it with you across the internet. A "Sign in with ChatGPT" button will become your digital passport. Once you’re logged in, apps and sites won’t just access a generic AI, they’ll access your AI, complete with its memories and context for you, and possibly also its integrations.

Altman envisions a future where you “sign in with OpenAI to other services” and developers use “an incredible SDK to take over the ChatGPT UI.” In other words: ChatGPT becomes your personalized portal to information and actions online.

(Side note: I think this gives OpenAI a distinct advantage versus API’s from competitors like Google and Anthropic that can’t offer something similar unless they achieve ChatGPT’s massive adoption—it currently has over 500 million users per week.)

Total integration

Through MCPs and other types of integrations, ChatGPT will connect to everything—your calendar, email, home, car, and more. It will stop being a site you visit and start being a layer that quietly runs across your life.

Altman describes this as the emergence of a new internet protocol, a kind of AI-era HTTP, through which “agents are constantly exposing and using different tools… all built in at this level that everybody trusts.”

Ubiquitous presence

OpenAI (or, at least, Sam Altman) is reportedly collaborating with Jony Ive on new hardware. The result may be ambient and always on—perhaps a pendant (like Limitless) or glasses (like Meta Ray-Bans). Wherever you are, it will be there.

“Voice will enable a totally new class of devices,” Altman says. ChatGPT won’t be an app. It will be more like a companion that’s with you everywhere, embedded in your existing devices, and dedicated ones to come.

Complex tasks

Tasks won’t require step-by-step instructions anymore. Say, “Get me a refund,” and ChatGPT will find the receipt, contact customer service, fill out the forms, and ping you if it needs your input. This will feel less like an app and more like a team of assistants working behind a single personality.

ChatGPT already has tasks, though they’re currently not that useful (in part because they use an inferior model to one like o3). Soon, you’ll be able to truly delegate tasks to ChatGPT, even complex ones. And based on leaks of an upcoming OpenAI workflow product, you may also be able to craft step-by-step workflows for ChatGPT to run.

Custom interfaces

Right now, ChatGPT’s responses are mostly limited to text, charts, and images. But wouldn’t it be great to have more options?

For example, I encourage my kids to use ChatGPT for studying. But to make a quiz, I have to use a Canvas, which isn’t conversational. Wouldn’t it be better if, when tutoring my kids (or me), ChatGPT could just create the appropriate user interface elements when needed, like a multiple choice quiz?

This is something Altman envisions, and is one of the reasons OpenAI sees coding ability as so important to its models. “You get text back, maybe you get an image, you would like to get a whole program back… custom rendered code for every response,” he says.

How to prepare

This future depends on trust. For ChatGPT to serve as your operating system, it needs access to your personal information and apps. That requires further developing the product, yes. But it also requires users willing to invest their context.

That’s why I’ve started feeding it mine.

I journal into it. I plan with it. I reflect with it. I don’t give it everything—no credit card information (not yet, anyway)—but enough.

I’m making a two-part bet.

First, I bet that OpenAI is strongly incentivized to maximize privacy and security because its future depends on maintaining user and business trust. So far, it’s making the right moves. And realizing Altman’s vision will take even stronger safeguards in the years ahead.

Second, I bet that in 2026, based on everything we’re hearing from Altman, the people with the richest ChatGPT relationships will be the ones who benefit most.

I intend to be one of them.