OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has downplayed hopes that the next version of ChatGPT will be released in 2025.
Altman said that “nothing we’ll call GPT-5” will arrive in 2025 in a post on the social network Reddit.
The CEO explained that his company was focused on shipping GPT-o1, previously codenamed “Project Strawberry,” a new AI model from OpenAI that will focus on “thinking through” problems before providing answers.
The GPT-o1 may be more useful for specialized use cases such as science, mathematics, and academic research.
“All these models have become quite complex, and we can’t ship as many things in parallel as we’d like,” Altman explained in a Reddit post.
He added that OpenAI “faces a lot of limitations and tough decisions about us sharing our computing for a lot of great ideas.”
The CEO dropped many other hints about the future of ChatGPT within the Reddit Q&A session.
Although concrete details were scarce, Altman predicted that ChatGPT’s “next giant breakthrough” would be “agents”
AI agents are tools that can perform tasks independently, interacting with the world without human intervention. For example, booking you a flight or a concert ticket, or answering a question for the IT service desk.
Although he didn’t say anything specific, OpenAI VP of Engineering Srinivas Narayanan also said that in the future he would like ChatGPT to “understand my personal information better and take actions on my behalf.”
OpenAI’s leadership hasn’t exactly been non-promising when it comes to the future of GPT-5.
In Maysaid in a TALK at the Milken Institute Global Conference that “we’ll look back in a year and realize how laughably bad” previous versions of ChatGPT were.
But while GPT-5 may not be here as soon as some fans may have wanted or expected, the firm has given AI fans plenty of new tools to play with in the meantime.
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Earlier this week OpenAI unveiled a search interface for ChatGPT, ChatGPT search, which aims to give users the information they “would previously need to go to a search engine”. However, the update was only available to paid Plus and Teams subscribers.
Although the round of product updates shouldn’t come as a surprise, Altman also dropped some more unexpected hints about the AI tool’s future direction.
Altman hinted that one day he might open the door to adult “Not Safe for Work” content, which is currently strictly blocked by the tool.
“We strongly believe in treating adult users as adults,” he told a Reddit user. “But it takes a lot of work to get this right and right now we have more pressing priorities.”
He added: “We’d love to fix this one day!”
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About Will McCurdy
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