Artificial General Intelligence possible on current hardware, Sam Altman said.
New Delhi:
The recent Reddit AMA by OpenAI offered a glimpse into what ChatGPT has in store for its users across the globe., They AMA was led by the key leadership at OpenAI – CEO Sam Altman, Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, Senior Vice President of Research Mark Chen, and Vice President of Engineering Srinivas Narayanan. They answered everything from the scoop on ChatGPT updates to the broader vision they see for the future of AI. Their comments on the questions that Redditors posted reflect the roadmap to OpenAI’s ambitious future.
First off, Sam Altman answered the one question that is on every AI enthusiast’s mind: When is GPT-5 coming? The answer was a bit anticlimactic when he admitted that it was not slotted for this year, but something “really good” was on the cards instead.
Photo Credit: Screengrab from subreddit r/ChatGPT.
The new release will apparently be more advanced and better than before, with improvements not just in text but also to other multimedia inputs as well.
The most interesting note for daily users of ChatGPT is the announcement by Kevin Weil that revealed OpenAI is working on an expansion of the context window-that is to say, how many tokens the model can hold in memory at a given time. This means a user will be able to carry on deeper, more continuous conversations with ChatGPT, which is going to drastically improve efficiency for tasks like long-form conversations and intricate code. “We’re working on it!” Weil responded to a question asking for a longer context window, adding that the current 32k token limit “is way too small compared to other AI models”.
And if ChatGPT’s voice capabilities, released only a few months back caught your attention, you’re in for a bigger treat. Kevin hinted that the chatbot might soon be able to “sing to you,” suggesting an added voice interaction update that could even include music.
Photo Credit: Screengrab from subreddit r/ChatGPT
OpenAI’s DALL-E image generation model is also under refinement though all the details about the release of the next iteration are still under the covers.
Altman and his team also seemed incredibly enthusiastic about autonomous AI agents- an AI system that can take actions on your behalf without the prompts of a user- an AI clone of yourself. “This will be a big theme of 2025.”
AI agents reflect a significant step toward Altman’s larger stated goal: AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, which is essentially AI that could potentially understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being is capable of. Altman also answered in the affirmative when another user asked whether AGI was achievable with the currently available hardware.
Photo Credit: Screengrab from subreddit r/ChatGPT
Apart from the announcements, there were also reflections on the past and present of ChatGPT. Mark Chen, the company’s research SVP, acknowledged that the AI model has had a persistent problem with “hallucinations” whereby ChatGPT confidently provides information it knows to be incorrect. “Our models learn from human-written text, and humans sometimes confidently declare things they aren’t sure about.”
Chen suggested that this challenge is being met by OpenAI using reinforcement learning- a mechanism whereby models get feedback on accuracy by themselves- and by grounding the responses of ChatGPT in more trusted sources. Chen believes these improvements will gradually make ChatGPT much more reliable and accurate.
So, while a ChatGPT-5 may not be on the horizon, there is still plenty to look up to in terms of our AI future. This AMA was not just peppered with information, but also gave an inside on the personalities behind the AI flagbearer ChatGPT. One curious Redditor asked, “I’m curious, why did you write all your names correctly capitalized, except for ‘sam altman – ceo’ all in smalls?” Kevin Weil, the company’s “product guy” replied, “It’s sams vibe.”
