I want you to take a minute and visualize yourself climbing a long ladder. The ladder is fixed in space, and you can’t tell exactly how many steps there are to climb. You heard from a friend that if you make it to the platform at the top of the ladder, you’ll receive an awesome prize. As you start to climb, the first few rungs are easy. You know that you can always climb down again if you decide it sucks. But for now, you decide to keep climbing.

Eventually, you climb up 100 rungs of the ladder, and you take a peek over your shoulder. You realize that the ground looks small and distant from this height. Also, the ladder has begun to wobble ever-so slightly. You’re not entirely sure that the ladder will remain structurally stable, but you’ve told yourself that whatever is up here, has to be good. Your friend wouldn’t lie to you, right? So you keep climbing. And climbing.

You’re now 300 rungs up--the ground is obscured by clouds. Birds are giving you side-eye. As you climb, some of the rungs below you break off and fall away. The ladder wobbles constantly now. You’re no longer confident you’ll be able to get down without help. But you’ve come this far... might as well keep going.

Now, if this were a physical ladder, I’m sure most of you would be like, “Nah man, I’d get down.” You’d tell yourself that you’re scared of heights, or that climbing an impossibly tall ladder just hanging there in space is suspect, or that peer pressure is beneath you. You’re elevated. You’re independent.

And yet, many of us (and I include myself in this bunch) are climbing an impossibly tall ladder, except that the ladder we’re climbing is not physical, but virtual. Still, just like a physical ladder, we take each rung one step at a time. We judge each step relative to the one preceding it. We never ask ourselves whether it makes any sense to keep climbing, or whether the goal is worth it, or who put this stupid ladder here in the first place. We’ve come all this way, after all, and maybe there really is something magical and life-changing at the top.

Keep the ladder image in your mind’s eye as you read. For today, gentle readers, I’m going to talk about the ladder OpenAI is building.

The first rung was, of course, ChatGPT in 2023. Then the Atlas browser, released in October 2025. ChatGPT Health, announced only a few weeks ago in January 2026, is yet another rung. But OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, are still adding rungs for us to climb. Each will seem reasonable in isolation, relative to the steps we’ve taken before, because each new feature will seem genuinely helpful, interesting, or useful to us. But OpenAI isn’t building a system (only) to be helpful. It’s building a system to know us, completely.

As for the prize at the top?

It’s the complete picture of you.

Google gets a lot of information from searches, location, emails, and more, but it doesn't have itself access to a lot of source code. Facebook is similar.

Microsoft (via Github) has access to a lot of source code, but doesn't know much about people's preferences (Bing and Edge have a relatively limited market share).

ChatGPT and similar can get a lot of information about searches/users questions and preferences and source code (by scraping repositories but also directly getting code from their users).

This is already an intellectual property treasure, but when they start aggregating medical records, providing integrations with other stuff (via agents which by definition know what you're doing and probably learn some credentials in the process) and even researching brain-to-computer applications, the idea of a single company having access to all this is honestly... interesting, to say the least.