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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Clickbait title and contradicted by the sama quote:

> We’ll release in the coming months many different things. I think that’d be very cool. I think before we talk about a GPT-5-like model called that, or not called that, or a little bit worse or a little bit better than what you’d expect from a GPT-5, I think we have a lot of other important things to release first.

In other words, the next OpenAI GPT update(s) WILL NOT be GPT-5. Yes, we can expect improvements (because of course) but we shouldn't expect a major leap forward in AI the next couple of months from OpenAI.

When a CEO says "before we can talk about" it means "no". The language about other cool updates suggests incremental improvements or platform improvements, but not a major leap forward in terms of intelligence.

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In the latest Lex Fridman interview he said:

>We will release an amazing new model this year. I don’t know what we’ll call it.

And:

>So part of the reason that we deploy the way we do, we call it iterative deployment, rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT-5, we decided to talk about GPT-1, 2, 3, and 4. And part of the reason there is I think AI and surprise don’t go together. And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you want to call it, need time to adapt and think about these things.

>We’ll release in the coming months many different things. I think that’d be very cool. I think before we talk about a GPT-5-like model called that, or not called that, or a little bit worse or a little bit better than what you’d expect from a GPT-5, I think we have a lot of other important things to release first.

https://lexfridman.com/sam-altman-2-transcript

From the phrasing of the second quote it seems like GPT-5 might be synonymous with their conception of AGI or at least agentic AI. Maybe it was just bad phrasing and he was using GPT-5 as a stand in for the ultimate goal but to me at least it seems like they're holding back on it because they're still trying to get the agentic and reasoning parts right. I think I agree with his musings about Lex's reaction that maybe they aren't releasing iterations fast enough for them not to look like big leaps. I would think they'd have something by now that could at least be labeled GPT-4.5 and be deployed as an incremental improvement. Maybe now with Claude 3 Opus on the scene they'll need to ship something soon even if it isn't a huge improvement.

IMHO none of this meaningfully contradicts the parent, and some of it frankly comes close to outright insulting his audience's intelligence.

This was presumably said with a straight face, which I find both impressive and unsettling.

When CEOs and politicians speak you have to listen to what they say but also listen for what they don't say. If OpenAI had GPT-5 almost ready to go, sama would have clearly hinted towards that. He wouldn't talk about a model being maybe "a little bit worse than". That's not the language you use when talking about the next leap forward in AI. When asked about GPT-5 he immediately deflects and talks about the "other cool things" they have in the pipeline.

When a CEO deflects when presented with an opportunity to hype the next major leap forward in AI that's not a good sign. He talks about "iterative development" to give "the world [...] time to adapt". He's telling people to temper their expectations.

This is how Sama has always been though. He talked down GPT-4 and that was still a huge leap over 3. If anything, he's been more hypey than for 5.

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