“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on GPT-4: ‘People Are Begging to Be Disappointed and They Will Be’”, 2023-01-18 ():
In a recent interview, Altman discussed hype surrounding the as yet unannounced GPT-4 but refused to confirm if the model will even be released this year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has addressed rumors regarding GPT-4—the company’s as yet unreleased language model and latest in the GPT-series that forms the foundation of AI chatbot ChatGPT—saying that “people are begging to be disappointed and they will be.”
During an interview with StrictlyVC, Altman was asked if GPT-4 will come out in the first quarter or half of the year, as many expect. He responded by offering no certain timeframe. “It’ll come out at some point, when we are confident we can do it safely and responsibly”, he said.
…When asked about one viral (and factually incorrect) chart that purportedly compares the number of parameters in GPT-3 (175 billion) to GPT-4 (100 trillion [ie. mixture-of-experts]), Altman called it “complete bulls—t…The GPT-4 rumor mill is a ridiculous thing. I don’t know where it all comes from”, said the OpenAI CEO. “People are begging to be disappointed, and they will be. The hype is just like… We don’t have an actual AGI and that’s sort of what’s expected of us.”
…In the interview, Altman addressed a number of topics, including when OpenAI will build an AI model capable of generating video. (Meta and Google have already demoed research in this area.) “It will come. I wouldn’t want to make a confident prediction about when”, said Altman on generative video AI. “We’ll try to do it, other people will try to do it…It’s a legitimate research project. It could be pretty soon; it could take a while.”
On the money OpenAI is currently making:
“Not much. We’re very early.”
On how far we are from developing AGI:
“The closer we get, the harder time I have answering. Because I think it’s going to be much blurrier and much more of a gradual transition than people think.”
On predictions that ChatGPT will kill Google:
“I think whenever someone talks about a technology being the end of some other giant company, it’s usually wrong. I think people forget they get to make a countermove here, and they’re like pretty smart, pretty competent. I do think there’s a change for search that will probably come at some point—but not as dramatically as people think in the short term.”