Our First-Generation In-House Chip

The Prompt: Insights from OpenAI Global Affairs

AI isn’t well understood, but we learn a lot in our work that can help.

Our First-Generation In-House Chip

Jalapeño is our next step toward making AI more efficient and widely available

Jun 24, 2026

Hi

Welcome (back) to The Prompt. AI isn’t well understood, but we learn a lot in our work that can help. In this newsletter, we share some of these learnings with you:

[News] The newest add to our stack

Making advanced AI broadly available requires building the full stack. Accessibility doesn’t happen by accident – it depends on everything beneath the model: the chips, systems, and infrastructure that makes AI faster, more reliable, more efficient, and available to more people.

That’s why OpenAI is building Jalapeño, our first-generation in-house chip, designed to improve LLM inference – the work required to run AI models for people and businesses once they are deployed.

As AI becomes a daily tool for learning, work, creativity, coding, research, and customer support, the infrastructure challenge grows accordingly. Every faster answer, smoother interaction, and more reliable product depends on moving computation closer to the needs of frontier AI systems.

Jalapeño is key to our long-term strategy to design more of the AI stack ourselves. Building frontier AI requires more than world-class models. It requires leadership across the technology stack – from chips to data centers to software. By optimizing hardware around the workloads that matter most for frontier models, we can make better use of each watt, chip, and data center.

For users, more efficient infrastructure can make a personal ChatGPT assistant faster and more responsive. It can help businesses deploy AI more reliably. And it can support the broader goal of making advanced AI more widely accessible instead of keeping it constrained by cost and capacity.

Every improvement in efficiency is ultimately an improvement in access. Infrastructure is not separate from democratizing AI – it’s one of the main ways in which democratization happens.

That matters for safety, too. More efficient infrastructure does not simply expand usage. It gives more people the opportunity to build familiarity with increasingly capable AI systems, allowing society to adapt alongside the technology rather than after it. Broad access helps build resilience.

Jalapeño also points toward another shift: AI is increasingly helping build the infrastructure that powers AI itself. We used our own tools to help design the chip and begin writing kernels needed to operationalize it. That could become a preview of a larger shift in the technology industry, where hardware and software development cycles become faster, more integrated, and more AI-assisted.

Jalapeño is more than a new chip. It is another step toward building the infrastructure that can make advanced AI faster, more reliable, more efficient, and more widely available. The future of AI will not be determined by breakthroughs in models alone. It will also depend on whether we can build the systems that allow those breakthroughs to reach everyone.

[Data] Winning minds before markets?

Many of the world’s most populous countries consider China, not the United States, to be the leader on AI development, according to a recent Public First survey. That includes Indonesia (#4 in population), Nigeria (#6), Brazil (#7) and Mexico (#10). China itself (#2) wasn’t included in the survey but presumably would also agree. The only top-10 most populous countries surveyed that see the US leading China on AI are India (#1) and the US itself (#3). (The other three, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Russia, were not included in the survey.)

While the survey measures perceived leadership, not actual adoption, it’s nevertheless a sobering data point for US policymakers and others who believe – as OpenAI does – that the best future with AI is one built on democratic rails. Not only should the most people possible have access, but their access shouldn’t come with strings of surveillance, censorship, or anti-competitive practices attached, or with attempts to control the benefits to cement power for the state.

It’s particularly sobering alongside trends at home in the US. For one, corporate America and US-based developers are more open than ever to using open-source Chinese models.

In addition, sentiment about AI is significantly more negative in the US than much of the rest of the world, tempering the drive to build. Just 31% of American adults say AI is making society better, compared with 40% who say it is making society worse – a rounded net -9 score. Together with Canada (-8), the US is the most skeptical country surveyed. In contrast, Nigeria (+78), Vietnam (+73), India (+56), Brazil (+45), and Mexico (+44) all register strongly positive views of AI’s impact on society.

“We may well be in the early stages of a global divide on AI that sees America hosting a technology that the rest of the world is more excited to use,” says Seb Wride, Public First’s head of opinion research.

That's a sharp reversal from prior Public First surveys, when Americans were modestly positive about AI (+3 in 2024 and +5 in 2025). We plugged in the Public First numbers for the US into the AI Sentiment Tracker we built with Codex. The result: the new data sent our smoothed average down slightly, from Negative-13 two weeks ago to nearly Negative-15 now.

We’ll continue to update our tracker as public polling on AI becomes available.

[Prompt] A World Cup powered by prompts

The World Cup has gotten off to a strong start, including on ChatGPT. All 10 of the days with the greatest number of ChatGPT prompts about sports have occurred since the World Cup began on June 11.

Interest is especially intense around match time, per our privacy-preserving analysis. We see a more-than-doubling in prompts as each country approaches the kick-off time of their first match. And as the tournament goes on, we’ve seen increasing interest in group tie-breakers like goal difference, advancement and elimination, and the round of 32.

How is your favorite team currently stacking up? Try it out for yourself.

[About] OpenAI Forum

2:15 PM – 3:00 PM EST on Jun 25

Graphics created by Base Three using ChatGPT.