19 April 2023

OpenAI not training GPT-5, CEO says in response to Musk 'pause' letter

Christopher Hutton

OpenAI, the developer of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, said it is not working on the next generation of artificial intelligence.

CEO Sam Altman said at an MIT event on Thursday that OpenAI was not developing GPT-5, which would be the next generation of its large language model, and that it would not do so for "some time." GPT-4, the model underlying the latest version of ChatGPT, Bing's chatbot, and other applications, was released in March.

Altman's comment came in response to a question about the open letter signed by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and a large group of AI researchers asking for a six-month pause on AI training out of fear of the repercussions of powerful AI.

Musk's letter was “missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause," Altman said, and misstated that OpenAI was working toward a more powerful model.

"We are doing other things on top of GPT-4 that I think have all sorts of safety issues that are important to address and were totally left out of the letter," Altman stated.

Musk and other AI researchers posted an open letter in late March calling for a pause on all training of AI models more powerful than GPT-4. "This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors," the letter said. "If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium." Several members of the AI development industry slammed the letter, claiming that it misrepresents the issues, that it was pushed by OpenAI's competitors, and that several notable signatures were fake.

The Pentagon's top cyber warfare officer dismissed Musk's call to suspend training. "Artificial intelligence machine-learning is resonant today and is something that our adversaries are going to continue to look to exploit," Gen. Paul Nakasone said in congressional testimony.

Altman previously noted there is risk in AI development. "We've got to be careful here. I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this," he said recently.

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