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OpenAI prepares to launch GPT-5 in August

98 points by ghoulishly 1y ago

manishsharan 1y ago
Are they going to require my DNA and blood samples to access this ? Screw their organization verification. I am taking my business to Claude or Deepseek.
Fade_Dance 1y ago
https://archive.ph/KCPaw https://archive.ph/KCPaw
- kerv 1y ago
  the real hero - thanks
MaxPock 1y ago
Evolution or revolution? They’d better deliver, as Gemini has been hogging all the attention and open source models are fast catching up.
- Insanity 1y ago
  I use Gemini at work, and ChatGPT for everything else 'personal'. Also from my non-tech friends, I usually hear them talk about ChatGPT and not Gemini or other models. I think, even if Gemini outperforms ChatGPT, there's definitely a strong 'first mover advantage' at play. I suspect that being outperformed by Gemini etc won't diminish their market share significantly.
  - sequin 1y ago
    It seems that at least in software engineering, Claude is popular and people are shoveling tons of money into it, whereas non-tech people are not inclined to pay for ChatGPT. Market share might not be so important if your competitor is raking in all the cash.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Related: GPT-5-reasoning alpha found in the wild https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614644
WhatsName 1y ago
If it were any good I would assume there would be no need to hype it up. My theory is that LLMs will get commoditized within the next year. The edge that OpenAI had over the competition is arguably lost. If the trend continues we will be looking at inference like commodity prices, where the most efficient like cerebras and groq will be the only ones actually making money at the end.
- infecto 1y ago
  At the moment most of the dollars are coming from consumer, inclusive of business, subscriptions. That’s where the valuations are getting pegged and most API dollars are probably seen as experimental. The model quality matters but product experience is what is driving revenue. In that sense OpenAI is doing quite well.
  - janalsncm 1y ago
    If that is the case, the $300 billion question is whether someone can create a product experience that is as good as OpenAI’s. In my mind there are really three dimensions they can differentiate on: cost, speed, and quality. Cost is hard because they’re already losing money. Speed is hard because differentiation would require better hardware (more capex). For many tasks, perhaps even a majority right now, quality of free models is approaching good enough. OpenAI could create models which are unambiguously more reliable than the competition, or ones which are able to answer questions no other model can. Neither of those has happened yet afaik.
    - epicureanideal 1y ago
      Competitors just need to wait for OpenAI to burn all their free money and dig themselves a debt hole they can’t easily climb out of, and then offer a similar experience at a price that barely breaks even or makes a tiny profit, and they win.
    - runako 1y ago
      > three dimensions they can differentiate on: cost, speed, and quality The fourth dimension is likely to be the most powerful of the differentiators: specificity. Think Cursor or Lovable, but tailored for other industries. There's a weird thing where engineers tend to be highly paid, but people who employ engineers are hesitant to spend highly on tools to make their engineers more productive. Hence all Cursor's magic only gets its base price to ~50% of Intercom's entry-level fee for a tool for people who do customer support. LLMs applied to high-value industries outside of tech are going to be a big differentiator. And the companies that build such solutions will not have the giant costs associated with building the next foundation model, or potentially operating any models at all.
himeexcelanta 1y ago
They can call it whatever they want…not sure that has a great deal of meaning unless there’s a GPT-4/Claude 3.5 level step change.
- jobs_throwaway 1y ago
  Meh. The models are already quite useful. If the improvement is half of what the jump to GPT-4 was, it will be a big deal.
  - himeexcelanta 1y ago
    Agree on the usefulness of models. They still require a lot of babysitting for software development. We’re seeing marginal improvements, but the aggregate utility still adds up over time. Am just skeptical of OpenAI at this point for most things.
- jug 1y ago
  I doubt it will have. OpenAI planned to release GPT-5 in 2024 or early 2025, it underwhelmed, and anonymous OpenAI sources have claimed that the later GPT-4.5 was actually GPT-5 relabelled to set expectations. It was seen as roughly a 20% improvement over GPT-4o. This is when it sunk in for OpenAI that they were at the end of the road for non-reasoning models. Scaling issues made them too costly. Turning to their reasoning models, it’s also known and documented through SimpleQA and PersonQA that OpenAI o3 hallucinates more than o1, and o4-mini even more than o3. There’s an unmanaged issue where training on synthetic data improves benchmark results on STEM tasks but increases hallucination rates, especially troubling OpenAI models for some reason (my guess: they’re fine-tuned to take risks since it’s known to also increase likelihood of getting it right for hard tasks?) Google has long known OpenAI struggles with hallucinations more than them according to an anonymous Googler that I saw commented on this. This has been verified by the aforementioned benchmarks. Anthropic also struggles less. But as far as I can tell, they’re all facing issues with synthetic data acting like a double edged sword. So GPT-5 is going to be interesting. How well it exactly does will bear a lot of meaning for the kind of trouble OpenAI is in right now. Maybe OpenAI has found a novel approach in reducing hallucinations? I think that’s among their most crucial points right now. But other than this, no, I don’t expect a revolution, only an evolution. They might currently win benchmarks, but it will hardly be something that catapults them. If GPT-5 underwhelms, it will bear a stronger signal than merely the one that GPT-5 underwhelms. Because then OpenAI has trouble with both non-reasoning and reasoning models, and we’re likely to be looking at the end of the road on the horizon for current GPT based LLM’s and one where the winner will probably ultimately be cheaper open weight models once they catch up.
MaxfordAndSons 1y ago
> Altman decided to let GPT-5 take a stab at a question he didn’t understand. “I put it in the model, this is GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly,” Altman said. If he didn't understand the question how could he know the model answered it perfectly?
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  It takes a really special kind of self-delusion to recognize that you don't understand the question and also think you are qualified to evaluate the answer.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    Couldn’t someone who does understand it verify for you?
  - polotics 1y ago
    I can only assume that as part of the GPT's answer came a thorough explanation of the question, which meant that dear Sam got first to understand his question, and then could read further to see that the answer was good. One can dream, or at least that's what he wants us to do.
- janalsncm 1y ago
  Pay close attention to these demos. Often the AI is ok but not amazing, but because it’s shaped like the right thing they don’t look any deeper. It makes selling improvements fairly hard actually. If the last model already wrote an amazing poem about hot dogs, the English language doesn’t have superlatives to handle what the next model creates.
  - foolfoolz 1y ago
    usually less perfect is a better sign of integrity
- amohn9 1y ago
  This statement is definitely just marketing hype, but if we're being pedantic there are tons of questions that are hard to answer but have easy to verify solutions, e.g. all NP-complete problems.
pmdr 1y ago
What's the point of this article besides free propaganda? It seems to me like every other AI shop except for OpenAI and possibly Anthropic only gets mentioned once they actually release something.
- janalsncm 1y ago
  That was my thought, except the author even mentioned they couldn’t even get a comment from OpenAI for their “article”. Can’t beat free advertising.
- swyx 1y ago
  the media outlets respond to our clicks, and we click on gpt5 stories. monkey brain go brr.
- cheeze 1y ago
  For OpenAI at least, it's obvious. They are considered the industry leader at this point and are the most widely used LLM that folks are aware of (arguably, Google's 'in search' summarization is the most widely used). People get excited on an update in such a rapidly changing space. It really is that simple.
- butterlettuce 1y ago
  Probably because OpenAI is the best at this than any other player in the game. They’re on their way to replacing Google as the #1 search engine. Instead of “google it” it’s going to be “gpt it”, and we all know who “gpt” is.
  - kabes 1y ago
    Not sure. Since Google started to include a Gemini response on top of their search results I stopped using chatgpt for search
    - moralestapia 1y ago
      Funny, the AI summary makes the experience shittier for me. The UI jumps and everything moves, I now have to wait until it loads. Massive UX mistake, you learn this the first week you make websites ...
andrewstuart 1y ago
There’s so much work to be done developing coding related tools that integrate AI and traditional coding analysis and debugging tools. Also programming needs to be redesigned from the ground up as LLM first.
- bgribble 1y ago
  I am still skeptical about the value of LLM as coding helper in 2025. I have not dedicated myself to an "AI first" workflow so maybe I am just doing it wrong. The most positive metaphor I have heard about why LLM coding assistance is so great is that it's like having a hard-working junior dev that does whatever you want and doesn't waste time reading HN. You still have to check the work, there will be some bad decisions in there, the code maybe isn't that great, but you can tell it to generate tests so you know it is functional. OK, let's say I accept that 100% (I personally haven't seen evidence that LLM assistance is really even up to that level, but for the sake of argument). My experience as a senior dev is that adding juniors to a team slows down progress and makes the outcome worse. You only do it because that's how you train and mentor juniors to be able to work independently. You are investing in the team every time you review a junior's code, give them advice, answer their questions about what is going on. With an LLM coding assistant, all the instruction and review you give it is just wasted effort. It makes you slower overall and you spend a lot of time explaining code and managing/directing something that not only doesn't care but doesn't even have the ability to remember what you said for the next project. And the code you get out, in my experience at least, is pretty crap. I get that it's a different and, to some, interesting way of programming-by-specification, but as far as I can tell the hype about how much faster and better you can code with an AI sidekick is just that -- hype. Maybe that will be wrong next year, maybe it's wrong now with state-of-the-art tools, but I still can't help thinking that the fundamental problem, that all the effort you spend on "mentoring" an LLM is just flushed down the toilet, means that your long term team health will suffer.'
  - alex1138 1y ago
    I don't know how they get their sources, but it would be nice if it was directly from coding documentation (and not random stackoverflow answers) and if those guides were I don't know, more machine readable? (That's not a passive aggressive use of question marks, I'm genuinely just guessing here)
OutOfHere 1y ago
OpenAI promises too much and delivers too little. It promised "Agent mode" and "Study and learn", but I have neither despite paying for the service. I get the impression that OpenAI will rename what's intended as o4 to gpt-5 and package it as such.
- joshstrange 1y ago
  I will die on this hill. Nothing annoys me more than OpenAI acting like something is rolling out (or rolled out already) and then taking forever to do so. > ChatGPT agent starts rolling out today to Pro, Plus, and Team; Pro will get access by the end of day, while Plus and Team users will get access over the next few days. "Next few days" - It's 8 days later (so far). Lest one think "It's only 8 days, geez, calm down": They do this _all the time_. I don't even remember the length of the gap between announcing the enhanced voices and then forgetting about it completely before it finally rolled out. It sours every announcement they make in my opinion.
  - j_timberlake 1y ago
    I feel like Altman is taking Elon's path. ChatGPT was his Tesla Model 3. Now he's in the overpromise/underdeliver phase, he's probably going to get himself into a "funding secured" moment soon enough, but he definitely hasn't started calling people "pedo" yet.
    - gneuron 1y ago
      Arguably he already did with the $40B round from Masayoshi Son, who essentially committed only $10B and the other $30B was conditional on OpenAI converting from a non profit by the end of the year, but now that possibility is in question because OpenAI and Microsoft can't agree on a deal (and Microsoft controls whether or not OpenAi converts to a for profit, and when).
- kifler 1y ago
  For what it's worth, I had Agent Mode deployed to my account earlier this morning.
ml-anon 1y ago
Yawn
caseyf7 1y ago
Are they losing so many customers to Anthropic, Gemini, etc that they have to pre-announce this?

98 points by ghoulishly 1y ago

Are they going to require my DNA and blood samples to access this ? Screw their organization verification. I am taking my business to Claude or Deepseek.

Fade_Dance 1y ago

https://archive.ph/KCPaw https://archive.ph/KCPaw

kerv 1y ago
the real hero - thanks

MaxPock 1y ago

Evolution or revolution? They’d better deliver, as Gemini has been hogging all the attention and open source models are fast catching up.

Insanity 1y ago
I use Gemini at work, and ChatGPT for everything else 'personal'. Also from my non-tech friends, I usually hear them talk about ChatGPT and not Gemini or other models. I think, even if Gemini outperforms ChatGPT, there's definitely a strong 'first mover advantage' at play. I suspect that being outperformed by Gemini etc won't diminish their market share significantly.
- sequin 1y ago
  It seems that at least in software engineering, Claude is popular and people are shoveling tons of money into it, whereas non-tech people are not inclined to pay for ChatGPT. Market share might not be so important if your competitor is raking in all the cash.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Related: GPT-5-reasoning alpha found in the wild https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614644

WhatsName 1y ago

If it were any good I would assume there would be no need to hype it up. My theory is that LLMs will get commoditized within the next year. The edge that OpenAI had over the competition is arguably lost. If the trend continues we will be looking at inference like commodity prices, where the most efficient like cerebras and groq will be the only ones actually making money at the end.

infecto 1y ago
At the moment most of the dollars are coming from consumer, inclusive of business, subscriptions. That’s where the valuations are getting pegged and most API dollars are probably seen as experimental. The model quality matters but product experience is what is driving revenue. In that sense OpenAI is doing quite well.
- janalsncm 1y ago
  If that is the case, the $300 billion question is whether someone can create a product experience that is as good as OpenAI’s. In my mind there are really three dimensions they can differentiate on: cost, speed, and quality. Cost is hard because they’re already losing money. Speed is hard because differentiation would require better hardware (more capex). For many tasks, perhaps even a majority right now, quality of free models is approaching good enough. OpenAI could create models which are unambiguously more reliable than the competition, or ones which are able to answer questions no other model can. Neither of those has happened yet afaik.
  - epicureanideal 1y ago
    Competitors just need to wait for OpenAI to burn all their free money and dig themselves a debt hole they can’t easily climb out of, and then offer a similar experience at a price that barely breaks even or makes a tiny profit, and they win.
  - runako 1y ago
    > three dimensions they can differentiate on: cost, speed, and quality The fourth dimension is likely to be the most powerful of the differentiators: specificity. Think Cursor or Lovable, but tailored for other industries. There's a weird thing where engineers tend to be highly paid, but people who employ engineers are hesitant to spend highly on tools to make their engineers more productive. Hence all Cursor's magic only gets its base price to ~50% of Intercom's entry-level fee for a tool for people who do customer support. LLMs applied to high-value industries outside of tech are going to be a big differentiator. And the companies that build such solutions will not have the giant costs associated with building the next foundation model, or potentially operating any models at all.

himeexcelanta 1y ago

They can call it whatever they want…not sure that has a great deal of meaning unless there’s a GPT-4/Claude 3.5 level step change.

jobs_throwaway 1y ago
Meh. The models are already quite useful. If the improvement is half of what the jump to GPT-4 was, it will be a big deal.
- himeexcelanta 1y ago
  Agree on the usefulness of models. They still require a lot of babysitting for software development. We’re seeing marginal improvements, but the aggregate utility still adds up over time. Am just skeptical of OpenAI at this point for most things.
jug 1y ago
I doubt it will have. OpenAI planned to release GPT-5 in 2024 or early 2025, it underwhelmed, and anonymous OpenAI sources have claimed that the later GPT-4.5 was actually GPT-5 relabelled to set expectations. It was seen as roughly a 20% improvement over GPT-4o. This is when it sunk in for OpenAI that they were at the end of the road for non-reasoning models. Scaling issues made them too costly. Turning to their reasoning models, it’s also known and documented through SimpleQA and PersonQA that OpenAI o3 hallucinates more than o1, and o4-mini even more than o3. There’s an unmanaged issue where training on synthetic data improves benchmark results on STEM tasks but increases hallucination rates, especially troubling OpenAI models for some reason (my guess: they’re fine-tuned to take risks since it’s known to also increase likelihood of getting it right for hard tasks?) Google has long known OpenAI struggles with hallucinations more than them according to an anonymous Googler that I saw commented on this. This has been verified by the aforementioned benchmarks. Anthropic also struggles less. But as far as I can tell, they’re all facing issues with synthetic data acting like a double edged sword. So GPT-5 is going to be interesting. How well it exactly does will bear a lot of meaning for the kind of trouble OpenAI is in right now. Maybe OpenAI has found a novel approach in reducing hallucinations? I think that’s among their most crucial points right now. But other than this, no, I don’t expect a revolution, only an evolution. They might currently win benchmarks, but it will hardly be something that catapults them. If GPT-5 underwhelms, it will bear a stronger signal than merely the one that GPT-5 underwhelms. Because then OpenAI has trouble with both non-reasoning and reasoning models, and we’re likely to be looking at the end of the road on the horizon for current GPT based LLM’s and one where the winner will probably ultimately be cheaper open weight models once they catch up.

MaxfordAndSons 1y ago

> Altman decided to let GPT-5 take a stab at a question he didn’t understand. “I put it in the model, this is GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly,” Altman said. If he didn't understand the question how could he know the model answered it perfectly?

dragonwriter 1y ago
It takes a really special kind of self-delusion to recognize that you don't understand the question and also think you are qualified to evaluate the answer.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  Couldn’t someone who does understand it verify for you?
- polotics 1y ago
  I can only assume that as part of the GPT's answer came a thorough explanation of the question, which meant that dear Sam got first to understand his question, and then could read further to see that the answer was good. One can dream, or at least that's what he wants us to do.
janalsncm 1y ago
Pay close attention to these demos. Often the AI is ok but not amazing, but because it’s shaped like the right thing they don’t look any deeper. It makes selling improvements fairly hard actually. If the last model already wrote an amazing poem about hot dogs, the English language doesn’t have superlatives to handle what the next model creates.
- foolfoolz 1y ago
  usually less perfect is a better sign of integrity
amohn9 1y ago
This statement is definitely just marketing hype, but if we're being pedantic there are tons of questions that are hard to answer but have easy to verify solutions, e.g. all NP-complete problems.

pmdr 1y ago

What's the point of this article besides free propaganda? It seems to me like every other AI shop except for OpenAI and possibly Anthropic only gets mentioned once they actually release something.

janalsncm 1y ago
That was my thought, except the author even mentioned they couldn’t even get a comment from OpenAI for their “article”. Can’t beat free advertising.
swyx 1y ago
the media outlets respond to our clicks, and we click on gpt5 stories. monkey brain go brr.
cheeze 1y ago
For OpenAI at least, it's obvious. They are considered the industry leader at this point and are the most widely used LLM that folks are aware of (arguably, Google's 'in search' summarization is the most widely used). People get excited on an update in such a rapidly changing space. It really is that simple.
butterlettuce 1y ago
Probably because OpenAI is the best at this than any other player in the game. They’re on their way to replacing Google as the #1 search engine. Instead of “google it” it’s going to be “gpt it”, and we all know who “gpt” is.
- kabes 1y ago
  Not sure. Since Google started to include a Gemini response on top of their search results I stopped using chatgpt for search
  - moralestapia 1y ago
    Funny, the AI summary makes the experience shittier for me. The UI jumps and everything moves, I now have to wait until it loads. Massive UX mistake, you learn this the first week you make websites ...

andrewstuart 1y ago

There’s so much work to be done developing coding related tools that integrate AI and traditional coding analysis and debugging tools. Also programming needs to be redesigned from the ground up as LLM first.

bgribble 1y ago
I am still skeptical about the value of LLM as coding helper in 2025. I have not dedicated myself to an "AI first" workflow so maybe I am just doing it wrong. The most positive metaphor I have heard about why LLM coding assistance is so great is that it's like having a hard-working junior dev that does whatever you want and doesn't waste time reading HN. You still have to check the work, there will be some bad decisions in there, the code maybe isn't that great, but you can tell it to generate tests so you know it is functional. OK, let's say I accept that 100% (I personally haven't seen evidence that LLM assistance is really even up to that level, but for the sake of argument). My experience as a senior dev is that adding juniors to a team slows down progress and makes the outcome worse. You only do it because that's how you train and mentor juniors to be able to work independently. You are investing in the team every time you review a junior's code, give them advice, answer their questions about what is going on. With an LLM coding assistant, all the instruction and review you give it is just wasted effort. It makes you slower overall and you spend a lot of time explaining code and managing/directing something that not only doesn't care but doesn't even have the ability to remember what you said for the next project. And the code you get out, in my experience at least, is pretty crap. I get that it's a different and, to some, interesting way of programming-by-specification, but as far as I can tell the hype about how much faster and better you can code with an AI sidekick is just that -- hype. Maybe that will be wrong next year, maybe it's wrong now with state-of-the-art tools, but I still can't help thinking that the fundamental problem, that all the effort you spend on "mentoring" an LLM is just flushed down the toilet, means that your long term team health will suffer.'
- alex1138 1y ago
  I don't know how they get their sources, but it would be nice if it was directly from coding documentation (and not random stackoverflow answers) and if those guides were I don't know, more machine readable? (That's not a passive aggressive use of question marks, I'm genuinely just guessing here)

OutOfHere 1y ago

OpenAI promises too much and delivers too little. It promised "Agent mode" and "Study and learn", but I have neither despite paying for the service. I get the impression that OpenAI will rename what's intended as o4 to gpt-5 and package it as such.

joshstrange 1y ago
I will die on this hill. Nothing annoys me more than OpenAI acting like something is rolling out (or rolled out already) and then taking forever to do so. > ChatGPT agent starts rolling out today to Pro, Plus, and Team; Pro will get access by the end of day, while Plus and Team users will get access over the next few days. "Next few days" - It's 8 days later (so far). Lest one think "It's only 8 days, geez, calm down": They do this _all the time_. I don't even remember the length of the gap between announcing the enhanced voices and then forgetting about it completely before it finally rolled out. It sours every announcement they make in my opinion.
- j_timberlake 1y ago
  I feel like Altman is taking Elon's path. ChatGPT was his Tesla Model 3. Now he's in the overpromise/underdeliver phase, he's probably going to get himself into a "funding secured" moment soon enough, but he definitely hasn't started calling people "pedo" yet.
  - gneuron 1y ago
    Arguably he already did with the $40B round from Masayoshi Son, who essentially committed only $10B and the other $30B was conditional on OpenAI converting from a non profit by the end of the year, but now that possibility is in question because OpenAI and Microsoft can't agree on a deal (and Microsoft controls whether or not OpenAi converts to a for profit, and when).
kifler 1y ago
For what it's worth, I had Agent Mode deployed to my account earlier this morning.

ml-anon 1y ago

Yawn

caseyf7 1y ago

Are they losing so many customers to Anthropic, Gemini, etc that they have to pre-announce this?