OpenAI will not develop GPT-5 “for some time”, after the pause request

Sam Alman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, has confirmed that his company will not develop GPT-5, the supposed successor to its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot GPT-4, “for some time”, after a group of tech entrepreneurs – including Elon Musk- has called in an apocalyptic letter for AI systems “more powerful than GPT-4” to be suspended for six months.

Altman said the letter “lacked most of the technical nuances about where we need the break“, during a conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which he participated in by videoconference.

He also assured that his company is not working on developing a GPT-5, so the letter – which has already been signed by more than 25,000 people – seemed a bit “ridiculous”.

Although I do agree with the idea that OpenAI should “move with caution”, as there is “growing security rigor” and this is “really important”.

“I also agree that as capabilities become more serious, the security bar needs to be raised,” Altman said at the corporate event.

OpenAI created ChatGPT and then GPT-4, an AI chatbot that can generate human-like responses in seconds, and Microsoft uses its technology in its Bing chatbot.

However, the fact that OpenAI doesn’t work on GPT-5 doesn’t mean that you are not expanding the capabilities of GPT-4.

For those more concerned about the rapid growth of these AI technologies, Altman’s announcement that OpenAI is not developing GPT-5 is no consolation, as the company is expanding the potential of GPT-4 by connecting it to the Internet. for example. also could launch a GPT-4.5, as it did with GPT-3.5.

Likewise, OpenAI isn’t the only company working on this type of tool.

“Society has taken a break from other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do it here. Let’s take a long summer break of artificial intelligence and let us not rush to be caught unpreparedasked the open letter published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute in late March.

The letter was signed by Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and American researchers Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russel, among many others.

Meanwhile, Musk advances

Despite the fact that days ago Elon Musk said that the progress of artificial intelligence had to be stopped because it could generate risks for humanity, this Friday he announced his intention to join the race of chatbots that use that same technology (AI) and Start your company to compete with ChatGPT.

According to anonymous sources cited by the Financial Times newspaper, the CEO of Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla he discussed with various investors of the last two companies to participate in this new venture.

For the new project, Musk reportedly secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from manufacturer Nvidia.

GPU chips are needed to build a large language model (“Large Language Model”, abbreviation LLM): AI systems capable of ingesting huge amounts of content and producing writing human-like or realistic images, similar to the technology that powers ChatGPT.

Musk, who also heads Neuralink, a neurotechnology researcher, and The Boring Company, a tunneling start-up, has already started hiring engineers to work on this project, according to the specialized press.

So far, Musk has hired Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind employee, and about half a dozen other engineers.

The AI ​​startup is separate from other companies, although it may use Twitter content as data to train its language model and leverage Tesla’s computing resources.

The new company would allow Musk to go head-to-head with OpenAI, an AI company he was a part of in the past.

Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI, was an early investor and became co-chairman.

However, in 2018 it became a limited partnership (LP) and Musk left the board.

Following the popularity of ChatGPT launched by OpenAI last year, Microsoft announced a “billion dollar” investment in the company in January, and now the giant is using its technology.

Previewing an interview on the Fox network that airs next week, Musk once again shows his concern for the future of AI.

“AI is more dangerous than poorly designed production aircraft or poorly manufactured cars,” Musk said in the excerpt released Friday. potential, however small, for the destruction of civilization“, He added.