Altman: GPT-6 Astra kicks off the 'revenge of the ideas guy'

One person used GPT-5.6 to build software that 50 customers pay ~$500/month for. That's about $300K a year in revenue, from a product Sam Altman says "would have cost you millions of dollars if you had to pay for software engineers." In an Axios interview, he called this the "revenge of the idea guys", the people the industry used to make fun of.

Altman says GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI launched on Sept 3, pushes this further: "anyone who wants to have a company now has genius-level employees in every area of expertise." His other example was a full computer game built for just a few thousand players. That "never possibly made sense before. And now they do." He also called it "a big turnaround" that he now wants to back founders who deeply understand their users and can't code at all. Technical talent still matters, he says, but knowing how to code is no longer much of an edge.

There's reason for caution. The evidence so far is anecdotes, not data. Nobody knows yet how many of these micro-businesses last a year. And the pitch came just four days after Altman warned that the next models would be "sobering for everybody."

Why it matters: if building software gets close to free, knowing what your users need becomes the scarce skill, and investors are starting to pay for it.