ChatGPT has had the robotic equivalent of a makeover – but experts aren’t exactly impressed.
OpenAI unveiled a new flagship artificial intelligence (AI) model, GPT-5, yesterday.
The upgrade is available to all 700million users for free, though paid subscribers have fewer usage limits.
‘Our smartest, fastest, most useful model yet, with built-in thinking that puts expert-level intelligence in everyone’s hands,’ the start-up said.
What new features are there?
The virtual assistant is now powered by a so-called reasoning model, which spends more time ‘thinking’ through a problem.
OpenAI says the bot is far faster than before, is better at coding and is now more customizable.
Users can change the chat colours and choose from preset ‘personalities’, like ‘cynic’, ‘listener’, and ‘robot’.
Voice interactions have also been improved, and pro users will will soon be able to connect Gmail, Calendar and Contacts directly to ChatGPT.
To show off what this means, OpenAi compared GPT-5 to its previous model, GBT-4o, when it comes to writing poetry or a wedding toast.
It can also build simple software apps, such as video games or pixel art-makers, from short text prompts.
Health experts and officials have long cautioned people against using ChatGPT to ask medical questions, with the bot often citing fake scientific sources and giving shoddy diagnoses.
OpenAI claims the new bot is its ‘best model yet for health-related questions’, though it stressed it does not replace health professionals.
CEO Sam Altman said: ‘GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert.’
ChatGPT won’t ‘hallucinate’ so much, apparently
Chatbots are increasingly used by people for everyday tasks, like writing out emails they meant to send two weeks ago or asking for advice.
But this technology, called generative AI, has never been the best at ensuring that the information it provides is true.
It happens so frequently that researchers have a word for it – hallucinating.
The chatbots are called large language models (LLM) that learn by analysing texts on the internet to see how humans put words together.
But what it can’t learn is how to tell if something is true or not – as they try to guess the next word in a sequence of words, they sometimes generate phoney information as their patterns get muddled up with fake news.
So OpenAI engineers carried out two tests to see how often ChatGPT hallucinated.
The first, called Long Fact, involved asking the bot to answer questions about concepts or objects. They then asked it to make biographies of public figures, an examination called FActScore.
OpenAI said that for both, GPT-5 makes about 45% fewer factual errors than its predecessor, GPT-40, and makes things up six times less than o3.
A system card, which describes the algorithm’s capabilities, says: ‘We’ve taken steps to reduce GPT-5-thinking’s propensity to deceive, cheat, or hack problems, though our mitigations are not perfect and more research is needed.
‘In particular, we’ve trained the model to fail gracefully when posed with tasks that it cannot solve.’
So, is this really a big deal?
While OpenAI said this is a ‘major leap’ for the system, Michael Rovatsos, an AI professor at the University of Edinburgh, wasn’t too impressed.
He said: ‘While it’s too soon to tell, it sounds like no significant progress has been made on the core AI model, but instead, OpenAI is focusing on making it more useful by better controlling how it behaves through additional “wrapper” technology.
‘As an analogy, this would mean that what matters is not whether you have the best nuclear reactor, but whether you can actually build a safe and efficient power plant around it.’
Edoardo Ponti, an assistant professor in Natural Language Processing at the Scottish university, said the upgrade is ‘far from dramatic’.
‘The presentation was partly weakened by flaws in the result reports and a hallucinated demo,’ Ponti said.
‘Moreover, it left a bit unclear where GPT-5 stands with respect to models from OpenAI’s competitors.’
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