OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking at Stanford, pushed back against critics who argue that large language models are reaching a dead end, stating, “Betting against LLMs scaling at this point feels quite misguided to me.” Altman said a whole generation of researchers held the field back because they were too confident about what scaling could not do. He acknowledged that world models matter for robotics and similar use cases but argued that evidence still supports continued scaling. Altman pointed to an OpenAI model that recently disproved a mathematical conjecture that had remained unsolved for a long time, arguing that if a model can help produce a new mathematical result, it is no longer accurate to say LLMs only remix existing text. He also admitted that LLMs still perform worse than people on very long-horizon tasks that require judgment over time. The company is preparing broader access to GPT-5.6, a model family pitched around stronger reasoning, coding, scientific work and long-horizon agentic tasks.