OpenAI's latest step towards advanced artificial intelligence

Hindustan Times

a day ago

ALMOST TWO decades after the birth of the iPhone, Steve Jobs remains the model for any tech founder seeking to wow the world with their latest product. The launch events he pioneered at Apple, with their mix of showmanship and glamour, seized the world's attention and gave prospective customers the feeling that the future had finally arrived. It was in these glittering footsteps that Sam Altman , the boss of OpenAI, attempted to follow on August 7th, when the artificial-intelligence (AI) firm launched GPT-5, its latest model. The hour-long launch, with its tech specs and live demos, wore Apple's influence proudly.
The firm, which is seeking a fresh round of funding at a valuation of $500bn, made much of AI as a consumer technology. Until now, users have had to contend with an alphabet soup of models. For tasks that prioritised speed, there was the dainty 4o; for elegant prose, 4.5; for heavy-duty coding work, the juggernaut that was o3-pro. All these are now incorporated into GPT-5, a so-called 'unified' model that can decide for itself how best to approach any question it is asked. As a consequence, some casual users could be exposed to frontier AI for the first time.
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Once the curtain fell and the spotlight went out, though, experts who heard Mr Altman's presentation were asking the same question as those who used to tune in to Jobs: just how good is the technology? GPT-5 looks to be the best in the world across various domains, excelling in areas including software engineering and scientific reasoning. According to OpenAI it also comes closest yet to beating human experts on an internal benchmark measuring 'complex, economically valuable knowledge work'. But the model is world-beating only by a slim margin: it fares slightly better than OpenAI's GPT-o3, released in April, which was in itself just a modest improvement over last year's GPT-o1. In other words, GPT-5 is not the transformational leap that some were hoping for. But a few more years of steady progress like this could yield AI systems of transformative power.
The incremental improvement should not be a surprise. GPT-5 comes less than two months after OpenAI's last release, o3-pro, and the update represents about two months of progress in the fast-moving AI space. Moreover, according to METR, a research lab, GPT-5 is almost exactly where you might expect the frontier of AI capability to be in the summer of 2025.
In 2019 GPT-2 could achieve 50% accuracy on the sorts of tasks that took software engineers two seconds to complete correctly. By 2020, GPT-3 could rival those engineers for tasks that took eight seconds; by 2023, GPT-4 could reliably tackle ones that took four minutes. The data, METR says, suggests a doubling every 200-odd days. More than 800 days later and GPT-5, right on trend, can handle tasks that would take a human a little over two hours.
What does this mean for the achievement of 'artificial general intelligence' (AGI)? Boosters have said that within a couple of years models could reach AGI, or the point at which they do so much of the labour currently performed by white-collar workers that they reshape the global economy. GPT-5 suggests the technology could still be on track towards such a goal. Within two years, METR's trend suggests a model will be able to complete an entire working day's worth of labour. Superintelligent models, as those with capabilities beyond AGI are known, may take only a few more years.
As a consequence, GPT-5 has some safety experts worried. Gaia Marcus, director of the UK's Ada Lovelace Institute, a British think-tank which monitors AI progress, warned that the release of GPT-5 makes it 'even more urgent' to comprehensively regulate how models can be used. The Future of Life Institute, a safety group which once called for a six-month pause on all AI development, warns that GPT-5's software-development abilities show OpenAI is engaged in a reckless pursuit of 'recursive self-improvement'—building AI systems that can improve themselves. The trends suggest that, if current progress continues, world-changing AI systems could emerge within a few years. GPT-5 does not dispel the idea.