No ChatGPT-5 yet, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman confirms

“An earlier version of the letter claimed OpenAI is training GPT-5 right now. We are not, and won’t for some time,” Altman said. “So in that sense, [the letter] was sort of silly,” he added.

During the interview, Altman clarified that the company is working on upgrades and updates for GPT-4. “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,” he said.

Altman also addressed some of the concerns related to ChatGPT. He said that the open letter, allegedly signed by Elon Musk, lacks “most technical nuance about where we need the pause. We are not and won’t for some time.”

Nothing that “taking the time to really study the safety of the model” is important, he said that OpenAI spent over six months training GPT-4 before its public release. 

“As capabilities get more and more serious, the safety bar has got to increase,” Altman added. “I think moving with caution and an increasing rigor for safety issues is really important. The letter, I don’t think is the optimal way to address it.”

When asked if OpenAI will continue to be transparent going forward, Altman said “we certainly plan to continue doing that.” It must be noted that with the launch of GPT-4, the company has not released any information on the AI bot’s training data nor it has shared any information on GPT-4’s architecture, construction, or other true inner workings.

“Given both the competitive landscape and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar,” reads a report published by the company alongside the GPT-4 release.