OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says future AI will surpass ‘dumbest’ GPT-4 model

OpenAI’s co-founder, Sam Altman, has stated that ChatGPT is currently at its “dumbest” and assured there would be major future investments in AI development.

“GPT-4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again by a lot,” Altman told a seminar at Stanford University. “It’s important to ship early and often and we believe in iterative deployment. If we go build AGI in a basement and then the world is kind of blissfully walking blindfolded along, I don’t think that makes us very good neighbors,” he said.

Later into the conversation, Altman suggested that “GPT 5 is going to be a lot smarter than GPT 4″ in intelligence, and predicted that GPT-6 will continue this trend.

OpenAI’s financial sustainability

The CEO also responded to a question about the reported operating costs of GPT-3 and how they’ve increased for GPT-4. However, he refrained from disclosing the specific costs associated with developing and maintaining these models. Altman was then questioned on whether the expense of AI will continue to escalate and the long-term sustainability of such financial commitments. He told the audience that money was not a “driver” in his life and that the organization “didn’t realize we were going to need so much money to compute.”

Altman was recently removed from the company’s venture capital arm OpenAI Startup Fund, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The change, noted in the March 29 filing, followed scrutiny over Altman’s management of the OpenAI Startup Fund.

Though the fund was promoted similarly to a corporate venture arm, it was structured unusually, as Altman raised it with external limited partners and personally made the investment decisions.

“There is probably some more business-minded person than me at OpenAI somewhere that is worried about how much we’re spending, but I kind of don’t,” he said. When pressed on burning “$520 million of cash last year” for running the “phenomenal ChatGPT”, Altman disagreed and called the “dumbest” large language model “mildly embarrassing at best”.

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