In the months Prior to the release of his widely-anticipated ai model update, GPT-5, Sam Altman’s Hype Hype Train Built Up Quite a Head of Steam.
Long Before He was Openai Ceo, Altman Wrote that “Successful Founders” of Tech Companies are actually bulding sometting “Closer to a Religion,” And HIS of His 2025 Statements atstest to that. Take his “gentle singularity” post in June, in which altman insists “humanity is close to building digital superintelligence” Coldn’t Wait to Unveil Them This August.
What Capabilites, Pray Tell? Well, as soon as altman started dropping details, its Hype Train Was Making Local Stops in Some Pretty Mundane Places. Altman Told Alt-Right Podcaster Theo Von He Felt “Useless” When GPT-5 … Wrote a good email for him. And on x aka twitter, altman Enthused about GPT-5 … recommending a list of tv shows.
Granted, Altman said it was a particular complicated email, and the list was “thought provoking tv shows about ai.” These results, arguably, offered a Deeper appearance of undersrstanding than one might expect from GPT-4 and other openai models. But if altman was trying to signal that GPT-5 is an incremental improvement on its predacesor, raather than “True digital superintellicile,” this is the sort of thring he’d.
GPT-5 Problems Behind The Scenes
Altman’s Careful Language Tracks With a New and Devastating Report from silicon Valley scoop machine the information. According to multi sources inseide openai and its partner microsoft, the upgrades in GPT-5 Are Mostly in the Areas of Solving Math Problems and Writing Software Code-And Evene Thei Thei They “WON” WON “WON” Leaps in Performance of Earlier GPT-Branded Models, Such as the Improvements Between GPT-3 in 2020 and GPT-4 in 2023. ”
That’s not for Want of Trying. The information also reports that the first attempt to create GPT-5, Codenamed orion, was actually launched as GPT-4.5 because it wasn’s of a step up, and that insiders belieVed here Experimental models was worth the name GPT-5 as recently as June.
Mashable light speed
The Major Problem-“A Dwindling Supply of High-Quality Web Data” to train the model on-was supplemented by a problem of scale. Openai Researchers were reportedly unable to get their full gPT-5 model to produce the same results found when it was in
“Pure scaling is not getting us to (digital superintelligence),” Veteran Ai Expert and Noted Skeptic Gary Marcus Wrote in the Wake of the report. “Returns are diminishing.”
That appears to be true for ai models on them’re incorporated into ai agents, too. Yunyu Lin, a Researcher for AI Metrics Startup Penrose, recently discovered Multiple Large Language Models (LLMS), Including Openai’s O3 and O4 Mini, Degrade Over Time – EVEN WHEN OVEN OOVEN OOVE S TAME Supposed specialty, basic math.
When asked to do accounting using the company’s quickbooks, the models Had Error Rates of Roghly 15 percent within 12 months – Basically Committing Unintenal Accounting Fraid as Thei Triud as Thei TRIUD SHES Balance the books. But Openai’s Models was the WORST, Unable to complete a single month of Accounting: They “Consistently got stuck in loops,” LIN Wrote.
Why Openai’s Future Could Still Be Bright
So if GPT-5 degrades Over Time on Basic Math Tasks like its predacesors and competitors, CPAS can Breathe Easy. Same Goes for Software Engineers, Given An Increasing Number of Reports that AI-Written Code Turns Out to Have More Bugs Than First Excced (And In Extreme Cases, Ai CODING SASESTANTS HAWE GONE Rogue, Deleting Entre Company Databases).
But what about altman Himself? He’s probally fin, even thoughts openai has seen a number of high-profile defects in the last year (with many executives poached by meta). Openai Income, and Its User Base, Have Skyrocked In the Last Year. The company is on track to beat its $ 12.7 billion annual income projection for 2025, even as it is projection to burn through about $ 8 billion in cash this year GPT-5.
The promise of incremental improvements that could bring more paying customers on board, plus the possible that Openai could go public in 2026, is helping it secure as much as much as much in funing of the year. That’s laying a lot of track for the hype train that is GPT-5, not to mention its successors.
Back in 2024, Altman Sugged Openai Models Blad Continue Improving For “Another 3 or 4” Model Generations. In which case, we’ll see you back here in a few years for an explanation of why GPT-8 Isn’T True Digital Superinteligence Eather.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence Openai