Summary

Organization	OpenAI
Model name	GPT-5
Internal/project name	Gobi, Arrakis (GPT-4.5),
Model type	Multimodal
Parameter count	Alan expects: 2T-5T (2,000B-5,000B) Based on: i. doubling of compute power (10,000 ➜ 25,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs with some H100s). ii. doubling of training time (~3 months ➜ ~ 4-6 months)
Dataset size (tokens)	Alan expects: 40T-100T (around 80TB-200TB). See also: Gemini
Training data end date	Alan expects: Dec/2022
Training start date	Alan expects: Dec/2023
Training end/convergence date	Alan expects: Apr/2024
Training time (total)	See working, with sources.
Release date (public)	Alan expects: Dec/2024 (post US election)
Paper	–
Playground	–

2024 optimal LLM highlights

Older bubbles viz

Feb/2024

Nov/2023

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Mar/2023

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Apr/2022

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Interview about GPT-4 and GPT-5

GPT-5 Updates

20/Apr/2024: Dr Jason Wei at OpenAI: “Nothing gets my heart rate up like waiting for eval results on new models to come in.” (Twitter)

12/Apr/2024: Former Paypal CEO: ‘GPT-5 will be a freak out moment. 80% of the jobs out there will be reduced 80% in scope.’ (Twitter video does not match the quote)

4/Apr/2024: Unverified rumor: ‘Red teaming for GPT-5 underway.’ (Twitter)

29/Mar/2024: GPT-5 ‘coming soon’ to Double, an AI coding assistant backed by Y Combinator.

26/Mar/2024: GPT-6 preparation beginning: LifeArchitect.ai/GPT-6

18/Mar/2024: CNBC: NVIDIA said Amazon Web Services would build a server cluster with 20,000 GB200 chips. NVIDIA said that the system can deploy a 27-trillion-parameter model… (18/Mar/2024).

17/Mar/2024: Rumors that GPT-5 will be released mid-2024 (rather than the previous timeline of being delayed until after the Nov/2024 US elections).

14/Mar/2024: OpenAI CEO on GPT-5 to Korean media (14/Mar/2024):

“I don’t know when GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes a leap forward in advanced inference functions. What are the limitations of GPT? There are many questions as to whether it exists, but I will confidently say ‘no.’ We are confident that there are no limits to the GPT model and that if sufficient computational resources are invested, it will not be difficult to build AGI that surpasses humans.

“Many startups assume that the development of GPT-5 will be slow because they are happier with only a small development (since there are many business opportunities) rather than a major development, but I think it is a big mistake. When this happens, as often happens, it will be ‘steamrolled’ by the next generation model. In the past, we had a very broad picture of everything happening in the world and were able to see things that we couldn’t see from a narrow perspective, unfortunately, these days, we are completely focused on AI (AI all of the time at full tilt), so there is a different perspective. It is difficult to have.

“Other than thinking about the next generation AI model, the area where I spend the most time recently is ‘building compute,’ and I am increasingly convinced that computing will become the most important currency in the future. [But the world,] they have not planned enough computing and are not facing this problem, so there is a lot of concern about what is needed to build a huge amount of computing as cheaply as possible.

“What I am most excited about from AGI is that the faster we develop AI through scientific discoveries, the faster we will be able to find solutions to power problems by making nuclear fusion power generation a reality. Scientific research through AGI will lead to sustainable economic growth. I think it is almost the only driving force and determining factor.

“In the long run, there will be a shortage of human-generated data. For this reason, we need models that can learn more with less data.

12/Mar/2024: GPT-4.5-turbo page searchable via Bing and other search engines:

8/Mar/2024: The Memo GPT-5 convergence date due mid-March 2024 (8/Mar/2024) GPT-5 which should have started training before Dec/2023 (OpenAI CEO under oath 16/May/2023: ‘We are not currently training what will be GPT-5; we don’t have plans to do it in the next six months [to 16/Nov/2023]’), and so 120 days later would be due to complete that training next Friday 15 March 2024. For safety, I expect the GPT-5 public release date to be after the November 2024 US elections.

2/Nov/2023: US military comments on GPT-5 and industry (2/Nov/2023, PDF):

Question: Looking over the past year, how does DARPA and the DARPA programs that pop up, how do they stay relevant with the fast-paced advancements in AI? How does DARPA maintain relevance when it is that fast paced?

Answer (DARPA): One area is by program structure. The AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) is a competition where we partner with large language model (LLM) companies (Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI) to provide compute access to those in the competition. As the capability advances so too will the performers using them be able to leverage the advanced capability at the same time. That is one model. Another piece is that we will be keeping an eye on what is happening if the capability that we are working on in the program becomes outmatched, we will stop the program and regenerate or do something else. Another thing is that not all the frontiers are advancing at the same pace. Reinforcement learning is not going as fast as the transformer model. The pace of the frontier models is slowing down a little bit. A lot of the results that we are seeing right now include understanding what they are doing and what they are not doing. They haven’t released GPT5. They [OpenAI] haven’t really even started training GPT-5 due to the slowdown in the release of the H100s due to the production problems at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC). So, we have a little bit of breathing space. The Gemini model, getting the planning piece integrated in the LLM, we are not sure, we lack full transparency, but there are large research problems that still need to be solved. Hearing people say we’re “just a little bit away from full artificial general intelligence (AGI)” is a bit more optimistic than reality. There are things like the halting problem. We still have exponential things. We still need resources. I think there are still going to be super hard problems that are not going to be fixed by scaling.

31/Jan/2024: The Memo: Exclusive: GPT-5 and gold datasets (31/Jan/2024)

When raising a child prodigy, should we provide more learning and experiences or higher-quality learning and experiences?

When training frontier models like GPT-5, should we use more data or higher-quality data?

In Jun/2021, I published a paper called ‘Integrated AI: Dataset quality vs quantity via bonum (GPT-4 and beyond)’. It explored high-quality data aligned with ‘the ultimate good’ (in Latin, this is ‘summum bonum’).

OpenAI’s CEO recently spoke at a number of big venues including the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos-Klosters, Switzerland from 15th to 19th January 2024. He was recorded as making a very interesting comment:

As models become smarter and better at reasoning, we need less training data. For example, no one needs to read 2000 biology textbooks; you only need a small portion of extremely high-quality data and to deeply think and chew over it. The models will work harder on thinking through a small portion of known high-quality data. (Reddit, not verbatim, 22/Jan/2024)

One researcher (22/Jan/2024) similarly notes:

…potentially ‘infinity efficient’ because they may be one-time costs to create. Depending on the details, you may simply create them once and then never again. For example, in ‘AlphaGeometry’, it seems likely that for most problems there’s going to be one and only one best & shortest proof, and that any search process would converge upon it quickly, and now you can just train all future geometry models on that ideal proof. Similarly, in chess or Go I expect that in the overwhelming majority of positions (even excluding the opening book & endgame databases), the best move is known and the engines aren’t going to change the choice no matter how long you run them. ‘Gold datasets’ may be a good moat.

For text training, we’ve now hit massive datasets like the 125TB (30 trillion token) RedPajama-Data-v2, and I continue to track the other highlights on the Datasets Table.

Nearly three years after my data quality paper, are we finally on the way to higher quality (and perhaps temporarily smaller) datasets rather than ‘more is better’?

Explore more in my Mar/2022 comprehensive analysis of datasets, ‘What’s in my AI?’.

18/Jan/2024: OpenAI CEO: ‘GPT-2 was very bad. GPT-3 was pretty bad. GPT-4 was pretty bad. But GPT-5 would be okay.’ (Korean media)

GPT5 is much smarter (than previous models) and will offer more features. It adds inference capabilities, which is an important advance in its general-purpose ability to process tasks on behalf of users. Since people love ChatGPT’s voice feature, much better audio will be provided.

If I had to pick one thing, the writing would be greatly improved.

If you hold the iPhone released in 2007 in one hand and the (latest model) iPhone 15 in the other, you see two very different devices. I believe the same thing is true about AI.

12/Jan/2024: OpenAI CEO: ‘GPT-5 and AGI will be achieved “relatively soon”‘. (Twitter)

24/Nov/2023: Coke CMO probably got GPT-V and GPT-5 confused when he said: ‘Coca Cola Diwali has been done with GPT-5.’

Manolo Arroyo (Global Chief Marketing Officer for The Coca‑Cola Company):

I can give you maybe an insight, some pieces of new news that no one has shared so far. We have a partnership with Bain and OpenAI…

We were actually the first company that was combining GPT, which is the engine that enables ChatGPT, and DALL-E. Back then, no one knew that because of the partnership with OpenAI, we were the first company using GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 into one integrated consumer digital experience. No one knows, because it hasn’t been launched yet, that Coca Cola Diwali has been done with GPT-5 [probably referring to GPT-V] which is still not commercially available, and DALL-E 3 that has also not been launched…

And that’s how in just six months this technology is progressing… launch it for Christmas [2023] globally…
(— Coca-Cola’s Mega Marketing Transformation by The Morning Brief (The Economic Times), 17m31s – transcribed with my fingers because both otter and whisper were down…)

Edit: Making it clearer that the quote above must have been confused between GPT-V and GPT-5. GPT-V(ision) was announced as part of GPT-4 in Mar/2023. GPT-5 will be in training between Dec/2023 and Apr/2024 as an estimate.

13/Nov/2023: OpenAI CEO on GPT-5: The company is also working on GPT-5, the next generation of its AI model, Altman said, although he did not commit to a timeline for its release. It will require more data to train on, which Altman said would come from a combination of publicly available data sets on the internet, as well as proprietary data from companies. OpenAI recently put out a call for large-scale data sets from organisations that “are not already easily accessible online to the public today”, particularly for long-form writing or conversations in any format. While GPT-5 is likely to be more sophisticated than its predecessors, Altman said it was technically hard to predict exactly what new capabilities and skills the model might have. “Until we go train that model, it’s like a fun guessing game for us,” he said. “We’re trying to get better at it, because I think it’s important from a safety perspective to predict the capabilities. But I can’t tell you here’s exactly what it’s going to do that GPT-4 didn’t.” (FT)

Read more about emerging abilities.

22/Oct/2023: OpenAI CEO on GPT-5 being AGI: “We define AGI as ‘the thing we don’t have quite yet.’ There were a lot of people who would have—ten years ago [2013 compared to 2023]—said alright, if you can make something like GPT-4, GPT-5 maybe, that would have been an AGI… I think we’re getting close enough to whatever that AGI threshold is going to be.” (YouTube).

19/Oct/2023: Bill Gates says GPT-5 won’t be much better than GPT-4.

[Gates] predicts stagnation in development at first. “We have reached a plateau,” said Gates, referring to OpenAI’s GPT AI model, which has caused a stir around the world. The next version won’t be much better than the current GPT4; a limit has been reached.

(Handelsblatt, German media)

7/Oct/2023: More Gobi rumors and analysis in Reddit thread by FeltSteam (archive).

29/Sep/2023: Gobi rumors and analysis in shared Google Doc.

18/Jul/2023: OpenAI mentions ‘GPT-V’ in job listing (may be GPT-4V/Vision as in GPT-4).

18/Jul/2023: OpenAI files to trademark the term ‘GPT-5’. Full filing at USPTO: https://uspto.report/TM/98089548 and application table.

6/Jul/2023: OpenAI Alignment team lead comments on GPT-5 alignment (Alan: I don’t like to give airtime to AI doomers like EY, so this is mainly for Dr Jan’s response). ‘We can see how well alignment of GPT-5 will go. We’ll monitor closely how quickly the tech develops.’

We'll stare at the empirical data as it's coming in:

1. We can measure progress locally on various parts of our research roadmap (e.g. for scalable oversight)
2. We can see how well alignment of GPT-5 will go
3. We'll monitor closely how quickly the tech develops

— Jan Leike (@janleike) July 5, 2023

7/Jun/2023: “We have a lot of work to do before we start that model [GPT-5],” Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said at a conference hosted by Indian newspaper Economic Times. “We’re working on the new ideas that we think we need for it, but we are certainly not close to it to start.” (TechCrunch)

2/Jun/2023: OpenAI CEO updates, requested to be removed from the web, archived here.

31/May/2023: OpenAI announces GPT-4 MathMix (paper).

29/May/2023: NVIDIA Announces DGX GH200 AI Supercomputer (NVIDIA). ‘New Class of AI Supercomputer Connects 256 Grace Hopper Superchips Into Massive, 1-Exaflop, 144TB GPU for Giant Models… GH200 superchips eliminate the need for a traditional CPU-to-GPU PCIe connection by combining an Arm-based NVIDIA Grace™ CPU with an NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU in the same package, using NVIDIA NVLink-C2C chip interconnects.’

Expect trillion-parameter models like OpenAI GPT-5, Anthropic Claude-Next, and beyond to be trained with this groundbreaking hardware. Some have estimated that this could train language models up to 80 trillion parameters, which gets us closer to brain-scale.

20/May/2023: Updated GPT-4 chart for reference.
By request, here’s a simplified version of this full GPT-4 vs human viz; easier to read on a big screen!
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19/May/2023: OpenAI CEO (Elevate):

…with the arrival of GPT-4, people started building entire companies around it. I believe that GPT-5, 6, and 7 will continue this trajectory in future years, really increasing the utility they can provide.

This development is a big, new, exciting thing to have in the world. It’s as though all of computing got an upgrade.

I think we’ll look back at this period like we look back at the period where people were discovering fundamental physics. The fact that we’re discovering how to predict the intelligence of a trained AI before we start training it suggests that there is something close to a natural law here. We can predictably say this much compute, this big of a neural network, this training data – these will determine the capabilities of the model. Now we can predict how it’ll score on some tests.

…whether we can predict the sort of qualitative new things – the new capabilities that didn’t exist at all in GPT-4 but do exist in future versions like GPT-5. That seems important to figure out. But right now, we can say, ‘Here’s how we predict it’ll do on this evaluation or this metric.’ I really do think we’ll look back at this period as if we were all living through one of the most important periods of human discovery.

I believe that this will be a monumental deal in terms of how we think about when we go beyond human intelligence. However, I don’t think that’s quite the right framework because it’ll happen in some areas and not others. Already, these systems are superhuman in some limited areas and extremely bad in others, and I think that’s fine.

…this analogy: it’s like everybody’s going to be the CEO of all of the work they want to do. They’ll have tons of people that they’re able to coordinate and direct, provide the text and the feedback on. But they’ll also have lots of agents, for lack of a better word, that go off and do increasingly complex tasks.

16/May/2023: OpenAI CEO to Congress: ‘We are not currently training what will be GPT-5; we don’t have plans to do it in the next 6 months [to 16/Nov/2023]’.

"We are not currently training what will be GPT-5; we don't have plans to do it in the next 6 months"
– Sam Altman, under oath

— Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name) (@daniel_271828) May 16, 2023

11/May/2023: Microsoft Korea: ‘We are preparing for GPT-5, and GPT-6 will also be released.’ (Yonhap News Agency (Korean)).

13/Apr/2023: At an MIT event, OpenAI CEO confirmed previous statement from two weeks ago, saying “We are not [training GPT-5] and won’t for some time.”

Meme inspired by /r/singularity.

29/Mar/2023: Hannah Wong, a spokesperson for OpenAI, says… OpenAI is not currently training GPT-5. (Wired).

29/Mar/2023: ‘i have been told that gpt5 is scheduled to complete training this december and that openai expects it to achieve agi. which means we will all hotly debate as to whether it actually achieves agi. which means it will.’

Siqi is the founder and CEO of Runway, an a16z funded startup.

i have been told that gpt5 is scheduled to complete training this december and that openai expects it to achieve agi.

which means we will all hotly debate as to whether it actually achieves agi.

which means it will.

— Siqi Chen (@blader) March 27, 2023

23/Mar/2023: Microsoft paper on GPT-4 and early artificial general intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130

20/Mar/2023: OpenAI paper on GPT and employment: ‘We investigate the potential implications of Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models and related technologies on the U.S. labor market.’ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130

13/Feb/2023: Morgan Stanley research note:

We think that GPT 5 is currently being trained on 25k GPUs – $225 mm or so of NVIDIA hardware…

The current version of the model, GPT-5, will be trained in the same facility—announced in 2020 [May/2020, Microsoft], the supercomputer designed specifically for OpenAI has 285k CPU cores, 10k GPU cards, and 400 Gb/s connectivity for each GPU server; our understanding is that there has been substantial expansion since then. From our conversation, GPT-5 is being trained on about 25k GPUs, mostly A100s, and it takes multiple months; that’s about $225m of NVIDIA hardware, but importantly this is not the only use, and many of the same GPUs were used to train GPT-3 and GPT-4…

We also would expect the number of large language models under development to remain relatively small. IF the training hardware for GPT-5 is $225m worth of NVIDIA hardware, that’s close to $1b of overall hardware investment; that isn’t something that will be undertaken lightly. We see large language models at a similar scale being developed at every hyperscaler, and at multiple startups.

Morgan Stanley on Nvidia’s opportunity with ChatGPT etc 👇🏻

“We think that GPT 5 is currently being trained on 25k GPUs – $225 mm or so of NVIDIA hardware…”

Let’s hope @annerajb and @GroggyTBear have sourced enough GPUs for ‘23. We’re pretty much sold out. Sorry 😔😔😔$NVDA pic.twitter.com/k6X9YOSsgF

— David Tayar (@davidtayar5) February 13, 2023

Remainder of note 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/TSKeYqetNP

— David Tayar (@davidtayar5) February 20, 2023

Datacenter location

Models table

Dataset

OpenAI President, Greg Brockman (Oct/2022):

…there’s no human who’s been able to consume 40TB of text [≈20T tokens, probably trained to ≈1T parameters in line with Chinchilla scaling laws]

Timeline to GPT-5

AI Race

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Video

OpenAI’s diplomatic mission (2023)

On 9/Jun/2023, at a fireside chat in Seoul, Korea, the OpenAI CEO acknowledged he was on a “diplomatic mission.” After the release of GPT-4 in Mar/2023, OpenAI staff visited the following regions:

1. Canada: Toronto
2. USA: Washington D.C.
3. Brazil: Rio De Janeiro
4. Nigeria: Lagos
5. Spain: Madrid (the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union ran from 1/July/2023-31/Dec/2023)
6. Belgium: Brussels
7. Germany: Munich
8. UK: London
9. France: Paris
10. Israel: Tel Aviv
11. UAE: Dubai
12. India: New Delhi
13. Singapore
14. Indonesia: Jakarta
15. South Korea: Seoul
16. Japan: Tokyo
17. Australia: Melbourne

visiting toronto, DC, rio, lagos, madrid, brussels, munich, london, paris, tel aviv, dubai, new delhi, singapore, jakarta, seoul, tokyo, melbourne.

also hoping to give talks in some of the cities and meet with policymakers.

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 29, 2023

Plus:

1. Jordan
2. Qatar
3. China: Beijing
4. Poland

Sources:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/20/openai-ceo-diplomacy-artificial-intelligence/

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1665320086415060992

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/25/sam-altman-european-tour/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/openai-ceo-calls-for-collaboration-with-china-to-counter-ai-risks-eda903fe

AGI

Read more about Alan’s conservative countdown to AGI…

Dr Alan D. Thompson is an AI expert and consultant, advising Fortune 500s and governments on post-2020 large language models. His work on artificial intelligence has been featured at NYU, with Microsoft AI and Google AI teams, at the University of Oxford’s 2021 debate on AI Ethics, and in the Leta AI (GPT-3) experiments viewed more than 4.5 million times. A contributor to the fields of human intelligence and peak performance, he has held positions as chairman for Mensa International, consultant to GE and Warner Bros, and memberships with the IEEE and IET. Technical highlights.