OpenAI in hot seat over GPT-4 successor ambitions as Musk, AI experts apply pressure

Article by Jacob Bourne | Mar 30, 2023

The news: OpenAI expects that GPT-4.5 will arrive in September or October of this year, per Digital Trends.

Although OpenAI leaders said they haven’t started GPT-5 training yet, Runway CEO Siqi Chen said he’s been told that GPT-5’s training will be completed in December and that OpenAI thinks it will be an artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The king of all marketing tactics: We know that achieving AGI is a focal point for OpenAI. The startup is likely working behind the scenes to build it.

From Microsoft’s perspective, those efforts are already underway. It recently described GPT-4 as having “sparks” of AGI in a research paper.
With a verbal IQ of 155, according to clinical psychologist Eka Roivainen, GPT-4-powered ChatGPT is an impressive stepping stone to AGI, but it pales in comparison to humans’ dynamic, multi-faceted reasoning skills.
We can expect to hear more companies use “AGI” in referencing their products as a tactic to get marketplace attention—after all, why buy a license for a competitor’s product when OpenAI could soon have the crown jewels?

Tech players raise alarm bells: We expect the march toward AGI to continue despite a letter signed by 1,125 people—including those working in the AI field and Elon Musk—who called for a six-month moratorium on developing models more powerful than GPT-4.

As of Wednesday morning, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hadn’t signed the letter, but what’s more relevant is that concerns raised by AI ethicists have been repeatedly dismissed.
The letter, which singled out GPT-4, could be viewed as a competitive move by Musk, who has expressed desire to enter the chatbot business, and CEOs from rival AI companies.

What’s next? Companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta will aggressively push the AI innovation needle this year, making acquisition attempts more likely.

Robust government regulation, not letters, will be necessary to prevent broad societal and economic disruption from generative technologies, but lawmakers are showing hesitancy to act—possibly for geopolitical reasons.
It’s unlikely that we’ll see a true AGI this year with human-like skills such as common sense, intuition, and multi-sensory complex reasoning skills.
Being biological, the human brain’s abilities are based on quantum mechanics. A quantum computer capable of running advanced AI models might be necessary to achieve AGI, which means the technical leap might still be years away.