Ina Fried: Interviews Sam Altman From OpenAI

Interviewer (Ina Fried):
So in a recent interview, Sam Altman let some new details about GPT 5 emerge and it leads us to believe that GPT 5 is going to contain more capabilities than we originally thought. In this video, we’ll dissect the Sam Altman interview and he touches on some rather fascinating points that many people hadn’t discussed before. But without further ado, let’s dive into the first clip in the interview because it is really interesting.

Sam Altman:
Look, when we decided to launch ChatGPT, we thought it was going to do well but we had no idea how well it was going to do. We knew they were going to be great eventually, but we didn’t think they were good enough to resonate like Chat GPT and GPT 4 have. This technology, even with all of its current limitations, is far more useful than we thought and can integrate into our lives in a much more valuable way than we thought. Now that we know that, as we think about launching the next much better models, we come with a different perspective. I learned something about important and urgent problems and not letting the important but not urgent ones fester. Here’s the thing I’m going to go get done in 2024.

Interviewer (Ina Fried):
What I found fascinating was that clip was actually circling around Twitter and I think people did kind of miss the mark on what Sam Altman meant when he was talking about this because there have been some key changes in how Sam talks about the AI. And when I say AI, I’m talking about GPT 4 and GPT 5. I think what Sam is trying to do is downplay GPT 4’s capabilities. The reason that I think he’s doing this, and this is just a hunch, but hear me out, I think that Sam Altman knows that these OpenAI’s companies are catching up to GPT 4’s level. Meta has even said that they publicly are going after the GPT 4 Benchmark. Google has previously gone after the Benchmark with Gemini. But I do believe that Sam Altman saying that, for example, GPT 2 was good, GPT 4 was okay, is basically saying that GPT 5 is going to be pretty incredible.

Sam Altman:
But of course, as we do know, something that you do need to remember is that it might be a GPT 4.5 release because if these systems are as even good as some of the internal people have claimed to be, then I think the shock would be a bit too much for the industry. Essentially what that would mean is that they might face scrutiny from regulators and AI safety teams because, of course, as you know, with every iteration in the models, there’s a significant jump in ability and also emerging capability.

Interviewer (Ina Fried):
I’m going to just play this bit again because he says even with all of its current limitations, and I mean think about it like this, right? If you’re a company of an AI company like you’re the CEO of an AI company, you’re not going to be out there publicly saying that even with all of its current limitations. But GPT 4 does have limitations, and you have to remember this is a model that has been out for quite some time. So I think the fact that he talks about the fact that it’s far more useful than what we thought and this is why I say okay it’s pretty different because he said okay now that we know and we think about launching the next much better models, we come with a different perspective. So that is why I say it’s going to be more fascinating and even in the recent video we did talk about the fact that Sam Altman and when he talked to Bill Gates was essentially saying that GPT 5 might be a more personal AI system.

Sam Altman:
If you don’t believe that that is the route that they’re taking, you may have missed the secret update in which they did a memory update. Now, if you don’t know what that is, I’m going to show you guys a quick screenshot. Essentially, if you’ve used Chat GPT for quite some time, you may or may not have seen this screenshot right here. This screenshot is not a leak, it’s not a false, it’s not fabricated. This is 100% real because even Greg Brockman has tweeted about this. The OpenAI employees have tweeted numerously about this and essentially what we have here is the memory update. So essentially it says your GPT can now learn from your chat to keep the conversation going. It’s going to carry what it learns between chats so even if you start a new chat, it’s going to know what happens before. It’s going to also improve over time which means it’s going to remember details, remember preferences on how you like to be spoken to on certain things,