In an interview just published on Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company’s latest and greatest AI model GPT-4 “kinda sucks”.

In the interview with Lex Fridman, Altman said “I think it kind of sucks” when asked about GPT-4 and its most impressive capabilities. “I think it is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are going to kind of suck, looking backward at them, and that’s how we make sure the future is better.”

As discussed by Gizmodo, Fridman, who had just finished praising GPT-4, was taken aback by Altman’s comments. Altman used the question to talk about how he’s way more excited about GPT-5, or whatever the next model is called. The OpenAI CEO noted his company would release a new version of ChatGPT in the next year, but didn’t specify what it would be called. Altman says this next model will be a similar leap forward that GPT-4 was.

“Look, I don’t want to downplay the accomplishment of GPT-4, but I don’t want to overstate it either,” said Altman. “And I think this point that we are on an exponential curve, we’ll look back relatively soon at GPT-4 like we look back at GPT-3 now.”

In the nearly two-hour(!) interview where Altman discusses everything from the OpenAI board saga to the Elon Musk lawsuit to Sora and more, the headlines seem to be the speculation about when exactly GPT-5, GPT 4.5, or GPT-4.5 Turbo (or whatever it will be called) will drop. After all, it’s been over a year since GPT-4 was initially released! Since then, Google’s Gemini was released in December 2023 and Claude 3 was released earlier this month.

My gut feeling is that when Altman says GPT-4 “kinda sucks”, we may be seeing the next version sooner rather than later. I’ve seen at least one site speculate mid-year for GPT-5. The key will be not when it’s released, but how well it works when it’s released. Google has learned that the hard way.

So, what do you think? Do you agree with Altman that GPT-4 “kinda sucks”? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “excited robot using generative AI on a computer”.

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