ChatGPT 5 release date: what to expect from OpenAI’s next chatbot – Evening Standard
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ChatGPT capped off a momentous 2023 with a series of huge updates, but this year could be even bigger for the artificial intelligence chatbot.
In recent months, hype has been building around a new and more powerful version of the tech that underpins ChatGPT.
This so-called large language model has been dubbed GPT-5. It is viewed as the stepping stone towards artificial general intelligence, or a machine that can think like a human.
Here’s what we know about the successor to ChatGPT.
GPT-5 is the follow-up to GPT-4, OpenAI’s most advanced chatbot that you have to pay a monthly subscription to use.
GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, which is a type of large language model that can create human-like text and content such as images. In the case of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot can conversationally answer questions.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the Financial Times in November that his company was working on GPT-5, although he did not reveal a timeline for its release.
Altman had previously quashed rumours that the firm was training the new AI model in March and June.
However, things changed in the autumn. Altman allegedly spoke about GPT-5 and GPT-6 during a talk at his former venture capital firm Y Combinator’s alumni reunion in September, according to two people who attended the event.
He said that both the AI models “were in the bag,” claimed Omar Shams, founder and CEO of Mutable AI.
Another attendee, Iba Masood, the founder of a Y Combinator-backed AI startup, said that Altman also discussed how GPT-5 and 6 were superior to their predecessors.
According to Masood, Altman said that GPT-5 and 6 would do “a more reliable job, with better personalisation, with multi-modal outputs.”
Multi-modal AI is trained on and uses content including images, audio, video, and numerical data. OpenAI says that GPT-4 is multi-modal, meaning it can accept text or image inputs but can only output text.
Altman said that the next ChatGPT still fell short of artificial general intelligence, according to Masood and Shams.
Hinting at its smarts, the OpenAI boss told the FT that GPT-5 would require more data to train on. The plan, he said, was to use publicly available data sets from the internet, along with large-scale proprietary data sets from organisations. The last of those would include long-form writing or conversations in any format.
However, Altman said it was hard to predict the model’s new capabilities and skills until its training had begun.
So, how can it beat GPT-4? Chiefly, it will need to outdo GPT-4 Turbo, the next-generation model that OpenAI released in November to paying subscribers.
The company’s most advanced AI chatbot has knowledge of world events up to April 2023, compared with 2021 for GPT-4; it can analyse even longer prompts of up to 128,000 tokens or roughly the length of a 300-page book; it’s better at following instructions; and can automatically switch between tools, including the Dall-E 3 image generator and Bing search engine, based on user requests.
Both OpenAI and several researchers have also tested out the chatbot on real-life exams. GPT-4 was shown as having a decent chance of passing the infamously difficult chartered financial analyst (CFA) exam; it scored in the 90th percentile of the bar exam; aced the SAT reading and writing section; and was in the 99th to 100th percentile on the 2020 USA Biology Olympiad Semifinal Exam.
At the time of writing, OpenAI hadn’t announced a launch date for GPT-5. It sounded like it hadn’t even started training the AI model as recently as November.
It’s also unclear if it was affected by the turmoil at OpenAI late last year. On November 17, Altman was ousted by the company’s board of directors. Following five days of tumult that was symptomatic of the duelling viewpoints on the future of AI, Altman was back at the helm along with a new board.
Curiously, some ChatGPT users recently claimed the bot had told them it was running on a new AI model called GPT-4.5 Turbo, but that was an error.
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