OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and several other company executives hosted an ask-me-anything (AMA) session on Thursday. The session was hosted on the social networking platform Reddit and users were told to ask questions about the AI firm’s products such as ChatGPT or general queries about artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial general intelligence (AGI). During the session, Altman said that GPT-5 will not be released this year, however, the company plans to introduce “some very good releases” before the end of 2024.

OpenAI Staff Host AMA on Reddit

The AMA session was hosted on the ChatGPT subreddit. Calling it “our Reddit launch”, several executives including Altman, OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil, SVP of Research Mark Chen, VP Engineering ​​Srinivas Narayanan, and Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki participated in the question-and-answer post. The official X (formerly known as Twitter) handle of OpenAI also posted about the Reddit AMA.

Answering a question about the timeline for GPT-5 or its equivalent’s release, Altman said, “We have some very good releases coming later this year! nothing that we are going to call gpt-5, though.” This seems on par with what multiple reports have confirmed with most expecting OpenAI to release the next flagship model sometime in 2025.

Another user asked about the value that SearchGPT or the ChatGPT Search feature brings, Altman said that he finds it to be a faster and easier way to get to the information. He also highlighted that the web search functionality will be more useful for complex research. “I also look forward to a future where a search query can dynamically render a custom web page in response,” he added.

Weil also fielded several questions from users. One asked about the delay in Sora, to which the OpenAI CPO said that the delay was caused due to additional time taken to perfect the model, getting safety and impersonation right, and the need to scale compute. However, he did not reveal a date for its launch.

Weil also highlighted that the ‘o’ series AI models, such as GPT-4o and o1-preview, will become a mainstay in the company’s lineup and will make an appearance even after the release of GPT-5. Additionally, he also revealed that the ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode could be tweaked to add a singing voice to the AI.

One user suggested, “Can we please get a hands-free way to end a voice conversation with ChatGPT? Using the action button shortcut on iPhone, but the voice chat needs manually dismissed every time.” Weil seemed to be impressed with the idea and said, “I love this idea. Sharing with the team now!”

OpenAI SVP or Research Mike Chen also answered an important user question about AI hallucination. Explaining why hallucinations from AI models are not completely gone, he called it a fundamentally hard problem. This is because the AI models learn from human-written text, and humans can often make errors, which then are added to the core dataset of the large language models (LLMs).

“Our models are improving at citing, which grounds their answers in trusted sources, and we also believe that RL will help with hallucinations as well – when we can programmatically check whether models hallucinate, we can reward it for not doing so,” Chen added.

Hours after the artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize in physics, he drove a rented car to Google‘s California headquarters to celebrate.
Hinton doesn’t work at Google anymore. Nor did the longtime professor at the University of Toronto do his pioneering research at the tech giant.
But his impromptu party reflected AI’s moment as a commercial blockbuster that has also reached the pinnacles of scientific recognition.
That was Tuesday. Then, early Wednesday, two employees of Google’s AI division won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for using AI to predict and design novel proteins.
“This is really a testament to the power of computer science and artificial intelligence,” said Jeanette Wing, a professor of computer science at Columbia University.
Asked about the historic back-to-back science awards for AI work in an email Wednesday, Hinton said only: “Neural networks are the future.”
It didn’t always seem that way for researchers who decades ago experimented with interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain. Hinton shares this year’s physics Nobel with another scientist, John Hopfield, for helping develop those building blocks of machine learning.
Neural network advances came from “basic, curiosity-driven research,” Hinton said at a press conference after his win. “Not out of throwing money at applied problems, but actually letting scientists follow their curiosity to try and understand things.”
Such work started well before Google existed. But a bountiful tech industry has now made it easier for AI scientists to pursue their ideas even as it has challenged them with new ethical questions about the societal impacts of their work.
One reason why the current wave of AI research is so closely tied to the tech industry is that only a handful of corporations have the resources to build the most powerful AI systems.
“These discoveries and this capability could not happen without humongous computational power and humongous amounts of digital data,” Wing said. “There are very few companies — tech companies — that have that kind of computational power. Google is one. Microsoft is another.”
The chemistry Nobel Prize awarded Wednesday went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google’s London-based DeepMind laboratory along with researcher David Baker at the University of Washington for work that could help discover new medicines.
Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, told the AP in an interview Wednesday his dream was to model his research laboratory on the “incredible storied history” of Bell Labs. Started in 1925, the New Jersey-based industrial lab was the workplace of multiple Nobel-winning scientists over several decades who helped develop modern computing and telecommunications.
“I wanted to recreate a modern day industrial research lab that really did cutting-edge research,” Hassabis said. “But of course, that needs a lot of patience and a lot of support. We’ve had that from Google and it’s been amazing.”
Hinton joined Google late in his career and quit last year so he could talk more freely about his concerns about AI’s dangers, particularly what happens if humans lose control of machines that become smarter than us. But he stops short of criticizing his former employer.
Hinton, 76, said he was staying in a cheap hotel in Palo Alto, California when the Nobel committee woke him up with a phone call early Tuesday morning, leading him to cancel a medical appointment scheduled for later that day.
By the time the sleep-deprived scientist reached the Google campus in nearby Mountain View, he “seemed pretty lively and not very tired at all” as colleagues popped bottles of champagne, said computer scientist Richard Zemel, a former doctoral student of Hinton’s who joined him at the Google party Tuesday.
“Obviously there are these big companies now that are trying to cash in on all the commercial success and that is exciting,” said Zemel, now a Columbia professor.
But Zemel said what’s more important to Hinton and his closest colleagues has been what the Nobel recognition means to the fundamental research they spent decades trying to advance.
Guests included Google executives and another former Hinton student, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist and board member at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Sutskever helped lead a group of board members who briefly ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year in turmoil that has symbolized the industry’s conflicts.
An hour before the party, Hinton used his Nobel bully pulpit to throw shade at OpenAI during opening remarks at a virtual press conference organized by the University of Toronto in which he thanked former mentors and students.
“I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman,” Hinton said.
Asked to elaborate, Hinton said OpenAI started with a primary objective to develop better-than-human artificial general intelligence “and ensure that it was safe.”
“And over time, it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits. And I think that’s unfortunate,” Hinton said.
In response, OpenAI said in a statement that it is “proud of delivering the most capable and safest AI systems” and that they “safely serve hundreds of millions of people each week.”
Conflicts are likely to persist in a field where building even a relatively modest AI system requires resources “well beyond those of your typical research university,” said Michael Kearns, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.
But Kearns, who sits on the committee that picks the winners of computer science’s top prize — the Turing Award — said this week marks a “great victory for interdisciplinary research” that was decades in the making.
Hinton is only the second person to win both a Nobel and Turing. The first, Turing-winning political scientist Herbert Simon, started working on what he called “computer simulation of human cognition” in the 1950s and won the Nobel economics prize in 1978 for his study of organizational decision-making.
Wing, who met Simon in her early career, said scientists are still just at the tip of finding ways to apply computing’s most powerful capabilities to other fields.
“We’re just at the beginning in terms of scientific discovery using AI,” she said.

Japanese telecom company SoftBank’s Vision Fund will invest $500 million (roughly Rs. 4,190 crore) in OpenAI’s latest funding round, The Information reported on Monday, citing a person familiar with the deal.

SoftBank declined to comment, while OpenAI did not immediately respond.

The company at the heart of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom is raising $6.5 billion (roughly Rs. 54,478 crore) in the form of convertible notes, Reuters exclusively reported earlier this month.

Apple reportedly dropped out of plans to participate in the large funding round, which currently values the AI startup at $150 billion (roughly Rs. 12,57,187 crore) before the SoftBank investment.

However, the valuation will be contingent on whether the ChatGPT-maker can upend its corporate structure and remove a profit cap for investors.

The deal represents SoftBank’s first investment in the Sam Altman-led firm, the Information report said.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board.

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