Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created the chatbot ChatGPT, launched a new “blow” at Silicon Valley, saying that it has lost its most important asset: the ability to innovate, Business Insider reports.

“Companies in Silicon Valley used to do great research, Xerox PARC being the most obvious example. They’ve been gone for a long time,” he said in a recent interview on a podcast hosted by Nikolaj Tangen, Norwegian investor and CEO of Norges Bank Investment.

Tangen was somewhat taken aback by the OpenAI executive’s remark, replying: “I’m surprised that you’re saying that Silicon Valley doesn’t have a culture of innovation, because that kind of contradicts what I thought.”

But Altman explained that he believes there is still a culture of product innovation in Silicon Valley, but that it has lost its edge in cutting-edge research.

“I hate to say this because it sounds arrogant, but what was the last major scientific breakthrough made by a Silicon Valley company before OpenAI?” – he said.

The creator of ChatGPT says that Silicon Valley is no longer interested in investing in research

Altman also seems to attribute the perceived decline of Silicon Valley to the shift from innovation to creating “high-value companies” in the shortest possible time, but based on already existing technologies such as the Internet and mobile telephony.

These companies, called “growth companies” in the American financial press, rely on a continuous increase in the price of their shares on the stock market, and investors expect a constant positive return on their investments.

But some analysts say that indicates that the respective companies’ share prices are overvalued, and that when they stop growing, investors quickly lose interest in them and move to other sectors.

An example of this is Tesla’s spectacular fall last year in the context of a general “growth company” stock market crash in 2022. But the U.S. stock market has made an equally impressive comeback this year, and many analysts believe that’s because of the general enthusiasm for OpenAI with its ChatGPT and other AI companies.

In terms of innovation capacity, this has been seen for decades as Silicon Valley’s greatest asset and the main reason why US tech companies do not have much competition in Europe.