OpenAI is poised to release in the coming months the next version of its model for ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that kicked off the current wave of AI projects and investments.
The generative AI company helmed by Sam Altman is on track to put out GPT-5 sometime mid-year, likely during summer, according to two people familiar with the company. Some enterprise customers have recently received demos of the latest model and its related enhancements to the ChatGPT tool, another person familiar with the process said. These people, whose identities Business Insider has confirmed, asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely.
“It’s really good, like materially better,” said one CEO who recently saw a version of GPT-5. OpenAI demonstrated the new model with use cases and data unique to his company, the CEO said. He said the company also alluded to other as-yet-unreleased capabilities of the model, including the ability to call AI agents being developed by OpenAI to perform tasks autonomously.
The company does not yet have a set release date for the new model, meaning current internal expectations for its release could change.
OpenAI is still training GPT-5, one of the people familiar said. After training is complete, it will be safety tested internally and further “red teamed,” a process where employees and typically a selection of outsiders challenge the tool in various ways to find issues before it’s made available to the public. There is no specific timeframe when safety testing needs to be completed, one of the people familiar noted, so that process could delay any release date.
Spokespeople for the company did not respond to an email requesting comment.
Sales to enterprise customers, which pay OpenAI for an enhanced version of ChatGPT for their work, are the company’s main revenue stream as it builds out its business and Altman builds his growing AI empire.
OpenAI released a year ago its last major update to ChatGPT. GPT-4 was billed as being much faster and more accurate in its responses than its previous model GPT-3. OpenAI later in 2023 released GPT-4 Turbo, part of an effort to cure an issue sometimes referred to as “laziness” because the model would sometimes refuse to answer prompts.
Large language models like those of OpenAI are trained on massive sets of data scraped from across the web to respond to user prompts in an authoritative tone that evokes human speech patterns. That tone, along with the quality of the information it provides, can degrade depending on what training data is used for updates or other changes OpenAI may make in its development and maintenance work.
Several forums on Reddit have been dedicated to complaints of GPT-4 degradation and worse outputs from ChatGPT. People inside OpenAI hope GPT-5 will be more reliable and will impress the public and enterprise customers alike, one of the people familiar said.
Much of the most crucial training data for AI models is technically owned by copyright holders. OpenAI, along with many other tech companies, have argued against updated federal rules for how LLMs access and use such material.
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