GPT-5 Possible Release Date & What Incredible Features It Might Include

GPT-5 is now official as AI enthusiasts have been anticipating since the release of GPT-4 within ChatGPT.

But what's actually next?

Many people are curious about this, including what Sam Altman has to say about it. Here's everything publicly available that we know about GPT-5.

When Will GPT-5 Be Released?

As of November 2023, it seems like the latest speculations assume GPT-5 will be released in early 2024 (possibly March or April).

Back in March, the CEO of Runway, Siqi Chen, tweeted that GPT-5 is expected to finish its training in December of 2023. But this claim seems to be unwarranted.

For the first time in June, Sam Altman clarified that the company is not currently training GPT-5. (We have more on this below.) It looked like they were focused on making GPT-4 better and smarter.

During OpenAI's developer conference on November 9th 2023, a few things about the advancement of GPT came forward:

• Altman reiterated again that GPT-5 is not yet in development. He stated that OpenAI still has significant work to do before training a model they would call GPT-5.
• Altman said GPT-5 is not guaranteed to work and that OpenAI still needs to solve difficult scientific problems and acquire more computing power first.
• Altman expects GPT-5, if developed, to potentially solve even more tasks than GPT-4. He said GPT-3 handled text, GPT-3.5 handles 5-8 categories, and GPT-4 works reliably in dozens of categories. He estimates GPT-5 may work for "most things you might want to build."
• The rumor that GPT-5 (codename "Gobi") could be released in early 2024 came from Brian Roemmele on Twitter. He claimed it is currently being trained on a massive dataset and will support text, images, and video. However, OpenAI has not confirmed these rumors. (even though he's leaked a few correct things before)
• Altman did not rule out OpenAI developing custom hardware in the future, though he did not directly address recent hardware rumors.
• Microsoft founder Bill Gates said he does not expect GPT-5 to be a major improvement over GPT-4 in terms of performance.

History and Timeline of GPT 1-4

Before we continue, let’s look back at the brief history and timeline of the GPT series. This will help us understand how OpenAI's language models have improved over time and give us an idea of what GPT-5 might be like.

There was quite a large time gap between GPT 3 to GPT 3.5 compared to any other version in the past. The models are just getting larger and there's becoming an increasing concern for an ethical discussion to take place before anything more advanced gets created.

GPT-1: Introduced in June 2018, this initial iteration of the GPT was trained by BooksCorpus, and contained 117 million parameters. One of its core features is being able to predict the next word in a sentence.

GPT-2: Released in February 2019 but was officially launched in November 2019. This second generation of GPT has 1.5 billion parameters and can generate coherent, multi-paragraph text. 

GTP-3: Released in June 2020, this smarter GPT version had a significant leap with a whopping 175 billion parameters. It can now create poems, write computer code, and translate languages. Most importantly, GPT-3 can answer factual questions.

GPT-3.5: Revealed with the launch of ChatGPT, this improved version of GPT 3 has four models, including GPT 3.5 Turbo, which was released on March 1st, 2023. Last August, OpenAI released fine-tuning capabilities for GPT-3.5 Turbo.

ChatGPT: Released on November 30th, 2022, this OpenAI consumer-facing service is specifically designed for chatbot applications. Trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), this free AI chatbot enjoyed a staggering 1 million users in just 5 days.

GPT-4: Launched on March 14th, 2023, this latest GPT version is exclusively available to ChatGPT Plus users and is believed to have 1.7 trillion parameters! Clearly, GPT-4 is much better than GPT-3.5 at doing complicated things and being reliable.

OpenAI Files for GPT 5 Trademark

Despite having no official release date yet for GPT 5, OpenAI is not taking chances for its exclusive ownership. This is why the AI giant has already applied for the GPT 5 trademark at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

According to the application, which was filed on July 18, 2023, GPT-5 is a set of downloadable computer programs and downloadable computer software for the following:

• for using language models
• for the artificial production of human speech and text
• for natural language processing, generation, understanding, and analysis
• for machine-learning-based language and speech-processing software
• for the translation of text or speech from one language to another
• for sharing datasets for the purpose of machine learning, predictive analytics, and building language models
• for conversion of audio data files into text
• for voice and speech recognition
• for creating and generating text
• for developing, running, and analyzing algorithms that are able to learn to analyze, classify, and take actions in response to exposure to data
• for developing and implementing artificial neural networks

Despite the move, it still doesn't appear that GPT 5 will get released this year.

While GPT-4 was released merely four months after ChatGPT, OpenAI spent more than two years developing, training, and testing it.

In that case, we may be waiting until 2025 for the release of GPT 5. If I had to make a prediction, I'd say we can expect further improvements to GPT-4 or even a possible GPT-4.5 before anything GPT 5 comes out.

Possible Features of GPT-5

Based on the trademark application, we now have some ideas on what GPT 5 can do even though it's rather broad. But while most of those mentioned are already present in GPT-4, we expect the successor to have a bigger infrastructure.

For the time being, here’s what we think GPT-5 will most likely have:

Fewer Hallucinations

It’s no secret that GPT-4 experiences “hallucinations,” which is a common complaint among its users. These AI “hallucinations” provide false or misleading information, make errors in reasoning, and cite non-existent sources.

To be fair, sometimes GPT-4 knows how to apologize for its errors once the user asks for further clarification – but it still is rather pointless to get corrected only after you ask.

Last May, OpenAI revealed a new strategy they are using to fight hallucinations. They call it Process Supervision, where the model is rewarded for each correct step of reasoning rather than the correct outcome (Outcome Supervision).

With that, we expect GPT-5 to have a huge reduction in hallucinations which will lead to a higher accuracy rate. Hopefully content sources can be more easily integrated, especially after the recent announcement of widespread internet access.

Larger Context Window

The context window refers to the range of words (or tokens for GPT-4) that an AI model can access. The larger the content window a language model has, the more effective it can be in handling complex, lengthier inputs.

Consequently, this leads to better performance and increased flexibility since it could do a lot more. This being increased would be a game-changer.

The max GPT-4 currently has is a staggering 32,000 token context length, which equates to around 25,000 words. For the English language, one token roughly on average, is about four characters or about three-quarters of a word.

Given the total length is double the 16k tokens for GPT-3.5 Turbo, it’s not a surprise that GPT-4 generates more accurate and contextually relevant responses compared to its predecessor.

We can hope GPT-5’s context window will be a lot larger than GPT-4. Claude already surpasses it,

Extended Multimodal Capabilities

OpenAI released GPT-4 as a large multimodal AI model, which is a huge leap from GPT-3. Unlike its predecessor which can only interpret text, this fourth-generation language model of GPT can now accept both text and images.

On September 25th 2023 they started rolling out the "vision" feature to many of those with ChatGPT pro.

In regards to GPT-5, apart from text and images, this theorized GPT version may also be capable of working with various media formats including videos.

Imagine GPT-5 creating 3D movies based only on an image concept, video samples, or even with a line of text (similar to what DALL-E 3 is).

Artificial General Intelligence

Artificial General Intelligence (or AGI) is a hypothetical form of an intelligent agent that allows a language model to achieve unfamiliar tasks. This includes situations that require a higher level of cognitive function.

Simply put, this means AI is able to learn and think like a human, and even better than humans.

Well, scientists and AI analysts believe that the current language models are now gearing towards AGI, especially GPT-4.

In a blog post last February, Altman identified the benefits and risks of AGI to humanity.

Three months later, he testified in a Senate hearing and urged lawmakers to impose tougher regulations on AI systems.

Can we expect GPT-5 to achieve AGI? No, but it may be one step closer to it. When AGI is achieved, we'll be seeing a lot more regulation and concern about AI than what's already in the media.

Is that a good thing? Up to you to decide.

Token Pricing Adjustment

For the API, GPT-3.5 Turbo currently costs $0.002 /1K tokens and $0.004/1K tokens for 4K and 16K content, respectively. Meanwhile, GPT-4’s 32K context is priced at $0.12/1K tokens.

Comparatively, the cost of Google’s PaLM 2 is close to that of GPT-4’s API, but the former is only trained on 340 billion parameters.

Anthropic AI’s Claude 2 costs $11.2/million tokens or around $0.0465 per thousand words (but has a 100,000 token context window)

These models get costlier with each new version, so we can most likely expect it to be even more expensive than the current rates.

Elon Musk, AI Leaders Called to Pause AI, GPT-5

Through an open letter, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and other biggest names called on AI giants to pause developments for at least six months.

The open letter was published on Future of Life Institute’s website on March 22, 2023, and now has 33,700 signatories. We should recall that Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped down in 2018.

“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.” The open letter reads, citing OpenAI’s statement on its vision for AGI.

Tech leaders noted that “powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” and that “this confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects.”

It should be noted, though, that Musk founded an AI startup called xAI, also in March 2023. 

Sam Altman Talks About GPT-5

The following month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was interviewed over Zoom at an event at MIT. You can watch the full video here. But to sum it up, Altman talked briefly about his thoughts on future AI models and categorically denied building GPT-5 at the moment.

He was also asked about the open letter, and he responded by defending his company.

“I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models, and we'll make them better in other ways. But I would say it, like grows proportionate to the model capacity.” Altman said, suggesting that new AI models may not be about the size but rather on the efficiency.

“There’s parts of the thrust [of the letter] that I really agree with. We spent more than six months after we finished training GPT-4 before we released it. So taking the time to really study the safety model, to get external audits, external red teamers to really try to understand what’s going on and mitigate as much as you can, that’s important,” He said, as his reaction to the open letter.

“I also agree that as capabilities get more and more serious that the safety bar has got to increase. But unfortunately, I think the letter is missing most technical nuance about where we need to pause — an earlier version of the letter claimed we were training GPT-5. We are not and we won’t be for some time,” He added, noting that addressing safety issues is crucial when it comes to AI.

From Altman’s words, we can see an unexpected twist in the race to develop new language models. In a later tweet, Altman reiterated the importance of AGI safety and that frontier models should be regulated.

With that, it makes sense to speculate that GPT-5 will not be released sooner than we thought. Nonetheless, we can expect that most of the predicted features will appear in future upgrades.

regulation should take effect above a capability threshold.

AGI safety is really important, and frontier models should be regulated.

regulatory capture is bad, and we shouldn't mess with models below the threshold. open source models and small startups are obviously important. https://t.co/qdWHHFjX4s

— Sam Altman (@sama) May 18, 2023

Will GPT-4.5 Be Released this 2023?

Now that we know GPT-5 is out of the picture (for now), what about GPT-4.5? Well, OpenAI has been silent about it so far, although earlier rumors revealed that GPT-4.5 could be released by September or October 2023.

But since we are now getting closer, it appears that GPT-4.5 is not coming soon. Come to think of it, GPT-3.5 was released around three years after GPT-3. 

Nonetheless, note that the situation today and when GPT-3 was released is quite the opposite. Although its release gained more mainstream attention than GPT-2, it was the launch of ChatGPT (and GPT-3.5) that changed everything.

And since further fine-tuning and additional features are highly demanded for GPT-4, it would be quite surprising if GPT-4.5 does come before the year ends or even in early 2024. They'll most likely keep refining GPT-4 and adding updates like we've seen in the last few weeks.

Is AI Moving Too Fast?

The straight answer is “yes,” and the open letter from tech leaders is solid proof.

And this is not just about GPT, but rather AI-powered chatbots and tools in general. Remember the viral AI image of Donald Trump that was created using Midjourney? The reversed decision of the US Copyright Office involving images also created using Midjourney?

We’ve also seen the negative impact of AI in education once students start to misuse it. How are schools and educators preparing for the challenges this school year to preserve the integrity of education?

Most importantly, the continuous so-called AI anxiety that workers and professionals experience for the fear of being replaced by AI. As for now, we have to follow the discussion and see where regulation and legal boundaries take us to.