During his latest interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased the arrival of “an amazing new model this year” but wouldn’t commit to it being called GPT 5. In the middle of a wide-ranging, almost 2-hour conversation with podcast host Lex Fridman, Fridman pushed Altman for a hint of when the company plans to release GPT-5.
“When’s GPT-5 coming out?” he asked. At first, Altman avoided the question, saying, “I don’t know. That’s the honest answer.” However, when Fridman joked, “Blink twice if it’s this year,” Altman offered a little more, saying, “We will release an amazing new model this year. I don’t know what we’ll call it.”
New model “in the coming months”
Altman also said he expects OpenAI to release the new model “in the coming months” but indicated, “We have a lot of other important things to release first.” Later in the conversation, Fridman circled back to the release date for GPT 5, asking Altman again, “Even though you can’t quite say details yet, what aspects of the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 are you excited about?”
Altman responded, “I’m excited about it being smarter. And I know that sounds like a glib answer, but I think the really special thing happening is that it’s not like it gets better in this one area and worse in others. It’s getting better across the board. That’s, I think, super cool.”
OpenAI, Sora and more
There were many other interesting quotes in the conversation which ranged across topics as varied as the November weekend power struggle at Open AI, his relationship with co-founder Ilya Sutskever, the Elon Musk lawsuit, Sora and his belief that compute will become the currency of the future and “maybe the most precious commodity in the world”
Of course, any GPT 5 release would have huge implications for the AI industry. Let alone OpenAI itself and the potential capabilities of ChatGPT. To listen to the full conversation with timestamps and transcripts follow this link.
