ChatGPT has got its first major update in years in the form of GPT-5.
The GPT models are the AI technology that underpin ChatGPT. The new version will be available to all 700 million users of ChatGPT, its makers OpenAI said.
The last major version of GPT, number four, was released in 2023, though OpenAI has unveiled a number of smaller updates since then.
OpenAI has at once tried to present the new model as being transformative and safe. Chief executive Sam Altman has tweeted memes about the possible radical update it could include, for instance, but the introduction also stressed that the system is still a long way from replacing humans.
GPT-5 includes a host of upgrades including the ability to integrate different models and to automatically decide whether it needs to work harder on a given problem. But OpenAI said that it also had a range of performance upgrades, including better performance in writing software.
It comes as OpenAI and other major AI firms face questions over whether their products will be able to make good on the billions of dollars of investment they have asked for. Microsoft, for instance, said that the new system would be available across its products, such as its CoPilot AI assistant.
OpenAI is particularly emphasising GPT-5’s use in businesses. In addition to software development, the company said GPT-5 excels in writing, health-related queries, and finance.
“GPT-5 is really the first time that I think one of our mainline models has felt like you can ask a legitimate expert, a PhD-level expert, anything,” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said at a press briefing.
“One of the coolest things it can do is write you good instantaneous software. This idea of software on demand is going to be one of the defining features of the GPT-5 era.”
One key measure of success is whether the step up from GPT-4 to GPT-5 is on par with the research lab’s previous improvements. Two early reviewers told Reuters that while the new model impressed them with its ability to code and solve science and math problems, they believe the leap from the GPT-4 to GPT-5 was not as large as OpenAI’s prior improvements.
Nearly three years ago, ChatGPT introduced the world to generative AI, dazzling users with its ability to write humanlike prose and poetry, quickly becoming one of the fastest growing apps ever. In March 2023, OpenAI followed up ChatGPT with the release of GPT-4, a large language model that made huge leaps forward in intelligence.
While GPT-3.5, an earlier version, received a bar exam score in the bottom 10%, GPT-4 passed the simulated bar exam in the top 10%.
GPT-4’s leap was based on more compute power and data, and the company was hoping that “upscaling” in a similar way would consistently lead to improved AI models.
But OpenAI ran into issues scaling up. One problem was the data wall the company ran into, and OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said last year that while processing power was growing, the amount of data was not.
He was referring to the fact that large language models are trained on massive datasets that scrape the entire internet, and AI labs have no other options for large troves of human-generated textual data.
GPT-5 acts as a router, meaning if a user asks GPT-5 a particularly hard problem, it will use test-time compute to answer the question.
This is the first time the general public will have access to OpenAI’s test-time compute technology, something that Altman said is important to the company’s mission to build AI that benefits all of humanity.
Altman believes the current investment in AI is still inadequate.
“We need to build a lot more infrastructure globally to have AI locally available in all these markets,” Altman said.
Additional reporting by agencies
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