AI models are already getting pretty smart, but people in the know seem to believe they’re about to get a lot smarter.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that GPT-5 — the company’s upcoming large language model — will be smarter than he is. “How many people feel they are smarter than GPT 4? ” he asked the audience at an event, and several hands went up. “Okay, how many of you think you’re still going to be smarter than GPT 5?” he asked, and slightly fewer hands went up. “I don’t think I’m going to be smarter than GPT 5,” Altman declared.
“And I don’t feel sad about it,” he continued. “Because I think it just means that we’ll be able to use it to do incredible things. We want more science to get done. We want to enable researchers to do things they couldn’t do before. This is the history of the long history of humanity. It does feel a little different this time because of what this can enable. But if scientists can do things because they have like a crazy high IQ tool and they can focus more on figuring out the right questions to ask, address things quicker, do their search space faster, that’s just a win for all of us,” he added.
“So we’re thrilled to get to enable that. Yeah, and those two people that said smarter than GPT 5, I would like to hear back from you in a little bit of time,” he joked.
This is quite a statement. Sam Altman was one of the world’s best investors when he was working with Y Combinator, and has now become one of the world’s top tech CEOs after co-founding OpenAI and helping bring about the current AI revolution. If he believes that OpenAI’s next model — which doesn’t yet have a definite launch date — will be smarter than he is, it would mean that there could be infinitely many Sam Altmans that would be willing to work day and night for as little as $20 per month. And there’s no telling how the future will unfold with all this intelligence and smarts being made available for basically free for humanity to use.