“GPT-4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again,” said the OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman at a time when his company is going big on superintelligence or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Altman essentially described ChatGPT as the dumbest AI chatbot, hinting at the future potential of its successors.
Altman, who had a topsy-turvy past few months, was the guest speaker at the recently held Entrepreneurial Thought Leader (ETL) at Stanford University. He made some interesting claims. Altman was engaged in a long Q and A session by host Ravi Belani, a Stanford lecturer. Their conversation touched upon various topics such as the future of generative AI and chatbots, the costs of GPT-3, AGI, etc.
During his conversation with Belani, Altman said that GPT-4 was OpenAI’s dumbest model that anyone would use again. This means that although GPT-4 was a major advancement at the time, the 39-year-old CEO views it as relatively unsophisticated compared to AI models that will subsequently come.
With his comment, it seems Altman is anticipating rapid progress with every new future model significantly outdoing the capabilities of their predecessors. Altman reportedly implies that GPT-4 will soon be obsolete and much more capable AI systems will replace it.
Belani touched upon the cost factor of working with GPT-3; Altman did not divulge details on actual costs of building the model. However, he responded saying, “I think giving people really capable tools and letting them figure out how they’re going to use this to build the future is a super good thing to do, and is super valuable, and I am super willing to bet on the ingenuity of you all and everybody else in the world to figure out what to do about this.”
Altman also spoke about what to expect from the upcoming GPT-5 AI model from OpenAI. He indicated that it is going to be a lot smarter than GPT-4.
“I think the most important thing about GPT-5, or whatever we call (it), is that it’s going to be smarter. And this sounds like a dodge. But, I think that among the most remarkable facts in human history is that we can just do something and we can say right now with a high degree of scientific certainty, GPT-5 is going to be a lot smarter than GPT-4. GPT-6 is going to be a lot smarter than GPT-5 and we are not near the top of this curve,” said Altman.
During the session, Altman asserted his vision for AGI. He said he is willing to spend $5 billion or even $50 billion a year, if needed, to make progress on AGI. His primary criterion is that the spending will put them on a path to eventually create far more value for society than what is spent.
“Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion or $50 billion a year I don’t care, I genuinely don’t as long as we can I think stay on a trajectory where eventually we create way more value for society than that and as long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills like we’re making AGI it’s going to be expensive it’s totally worth it…” he said.