GPTs Are Maxed Out
AI companies will have to explore other routes
March 2024. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joins podcaster Lex Fridman for the second time since ChatGPT came out a year prior. The stakes are high and anticipation is tangible. GPT-5 appears to be around the corner. Altman, elusive as always, provides only one data point for us hungry spectators: The next-gen model (he doesn’t name it) will be better than GPT-4 to the same degree that GPT-4 was better than GPT-3.
I close the tab and start typing. The long-form GPT-5 piece I’m working on just got a bit juicier. To those who understand the depth of Altman’s assertion, no words are needed. To the rest, I explain: suffice to say that if Altman is correct, GPT-5 will blow our minds.
Well, Altman was wrong.
In a damning article, The Information has now shed some light on what we should expect from Orion (that’s how OpenAI internally refers to its coming AI model, which everyone assumes is just GPT-5, rebranded). It seems Altman went ahead of himself and prematurely forecasted a jump in performance that never materialized:
While Orion’s performance ended up exceeding that of prior models, the increase in quality was far smaller compared with the jump between GPT-3 and GPT-4, the last two flagship models the company released, according to some…
