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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has poured cold water on hopes for the next major version of ChatGPT coming out this year.
"We have some very good releases coming later this year! Nothing that we are going to call gpt-5, though," he said during a Reddit AMA this week.
OpenAI will instead focus on shipping GPT-o1, previously codenamed "Project Strawberry," a new AI model from OpenAI that, while slower, is geared toward "thinking through" problems before answering. The idea is to make something that's useful for specialized use cases such as science, mathematics, and academic research.
"All of these models have gotten quite complex and we can't ship as many things in parallel as we'd like to," Altman said on Reddit, adding that "we also face a lot of limitations and hard decisions about [where] we allocate...our compute towards."
Though concrete details about the future of ChatGPT were sparse, Altman predicted that ChatGPT’s “next giant breakthrough” will be “agents," or tools that can perform tasks independently, interacting with the world without human intervention. For example, booking you a flight or a concert ticket or answering an IT desk service query.
OpenAI VP of Engineering Srinivas Narayanan also said that in the future he would love ChatGPT to “understand my personal information better and take actions on my behalf.”
Altman also hinted that he may one day open the door to “Not Safe For Work” adult content, which is currently blocked by the tool. “We totally believe in treating adult users like adults,” he told one Reddit user. “But it takes a lot of work to get this right, and right now we have more urgent priorities, adding “We would like to get this right some day!”
OpenAI’s leadership has ambitious goals for its models. In May, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap predicted that “we will look back in a year and realize how laughably bad” previous versions of ChatGPT were. But though GPT-5 might not be here as quickly as some fans may have wanted or expected, the firm has given AI fans plenty of new tools to play with in the interim.
Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled a search interface for ChatGPT, ChatGPT search, aimed at giving users information they "would have previously needed to go to a search engine for." However, the update is only available for paid Plus and Teams subscribers at the moment.