OpenAI and Sam Altman have predominantly remained tight-lipped about GPT-4's successor — GPT-5. However, the CEO seemingly revealed more information about the proprietary and much-anticipated model while in a panel discussion on The Age of AI at TU Berlin.
The executive asked the audience, "How many people feel they are smarter than GPT 4?" Multiple people in the audience raised their hands, prompting his next question: “Okay, how many of you think you’re still going to be smarter than GPT 5?”
Interestingly, fewer people raised their hands. The executive claims that the model could be smarter than him.
Sam Altman on GPT-5 in Berlin today “How many of you think you will still be smarter than GPT-5 ? I don’t think I’m gonna be smarter than GPT-5” #Gpt5 @sama 👀 pic.twitter.com/I9jKr2k6SaFebruary 7, 2025
I don’t think I’m going to be smarter than GPT-5. And I don’t feel sad about it because I think it just means that we’ll be able to use it to do incredible things. And you know like we want more science to get done. We want more, we want to enable researchers to do things they couldn’t do before. This is the history of, this is like the long history of humanity.
OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman
Incidentally, the ChatGPT maker recently held a Reddit AMA session, sharing important details about the company's commitment to its founding mission, DeepSeek, and the roadmap for its product releases, including GPT-5. While OpenAI didn't categorically indicate the exact date the product is slated to ship, Sam Altman confirmed that it's indeed in development and that it would be released under the "GPT" moniker like its predecessors.
This isn't the first time OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has talked about GPT-5 and next-gen capabilities. Last year, the executive claimed that GPT-5 would be smarter than GPT-4 with "a high degree of scientific certainty."
Sam Altman admitted GPT-4 "kind of sucks" and that it's "mildly embarrassing at best. "According to the CEO:
"GPT-4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again by a lot. It's important to ship early and often and we believe in iterative deployment."
In the grand scheme of things, GPT-5 promises to bring better performance and accuracy to ChatGPT.
The past month has been a handful for the AI landscape, with top labs hitting a wall in AI progression due to a lack of high-quality content for model training, OpenAI making a $500 billion commitment to facilitate the construction of high-end infrastructure in the United States and the emergence of DeepSeek's ultra-cost-effective AI. It'll be interesting to see if GPT-5 tips the scale back in OpenAI's favor.
