Matt O’Brien
Openai released the fifth generation of artificial intelligence technology on Thursday to enhance ChatGpt, which is closely monitored as a measure of whether the generator AI is rapidly advancing or hitting a plateau.
The GPT-5 arrives more than two years after the release of GPT-4 in March 2023 and book a period of hype and worry about AI’s capabilities.
In anticipation, rival humanity released the latest version of its own chatbot, Claude earlier this week. This was part of a race with the US and China, with Google and other competitors, to jump up and down each other on the AI benchmark. Meanwhile, longtime Openai partner Microsoft said it will incorporate GPT-5 into its own AI assistant Copilot.
San Francisco Company has long positioned technological advances as its San Francisco company as its path to AGI, a technology that is supposed to surpass humans in economically valuable jobs, so there are high expectations for the latest version of Openai’s flagship model.
They also try to raise a huge amount of money to get there for some of the costly computer chips and data center payments needed to build and operate technology.
Openai CEO Sam Altman described the new model as “an important step along our path to AGI,” but it mainly focuses on ease of use for the 700 million people who say he uses ChatGpt every week.
“It’s like talking to an expert. It’s on demand, just about PHD level experts in everything, in the area you need,” Altman said at a live-streamed launch event on Thursday.
It may take some time to see how people are using the new model – there are currently usage restrictions and are now available to anyone with a free ChatGPT account. Thursday’s event focused on using it in coding ChatGpt, a region where humanity is considered a leader, and featured guest appearances by the CEO of Coding Software Maker Cursor, a key human customer.
Openai presenters also spent time talking about safety improvements, making chatbots “non-deceptive” and stopping them from generating harmful reactions to “cleverly verbally” prompts that could bypass guardrails. The Associated Press reported on Wednesday about a study that showed ChatGPT was providing dangerous information about drugs and self-harm to researchers pretending to be teenagers.
At the technical level, the GPT-5 shows “conservative but substantial improvements” in its latest benchmarks, but compared to the GPT-4, it also resets Openai’s flagship technology to set the stage for future innovation.
“I don’t believe it’s the end of work and that AI is just trying to solve all human problems, but I think there’s still a lot of headroom for them and there’s still a lot in this area to continue to improve technology,” he said. “It’s not just about taking advantage of the profits that have already been made.”
Openai started in 2015 as a non-profit research lab that safely builds AGIs, and has since incorporated a valuation that has grown to $300 billion in commercial companies. The company has tried to change its structure since the nonprofit committee expelled Altman in November 2023. He was revived a few days later.
Although he has not yet reported profitable, he has encountered hurdles to escape his nonprofit roots, including scrutiny from the nonprofit and Delaware attorney general, overseeing the nonprofit and the lawsuit by Elon Musk, the founder of Open Eye, who now runs his own AI company.
Recently, Openai said it would turn commercial companies into public benefits companies. This must balance the interests of shareholders and their mission.
Openai is the world’s third most valuable private company and a pioneer in the AI industry, with “increasingly fragile moats” on the AI frontier, and recently made the unusual decision to cover the company despite its unpublished release.
The inability of a single AI developer to have a “sustainable competitiveness” could force businesses to more and more compete to lower prices for AI products, the bank said in a report last month.
Associated Press and OpenAI have licenses and technology agreements that allow OpenAI to access some of the AP’s text archives.
Original issue: August 7, 2025, 5:28pm EDT
