Interesting/unfortunate/expected that GPT-5 isn't touted as AGI or some other outlandish claim. It's just improved reasoning etc. I know it's not the actual announcement and it's just a single page accidentally released, but it at least seems more grounded...? Have to wait and see what the actual announcement entails.
At this point it's pretty obvious that the easy scaling gains have been made already and AI labs are scrounging for tricks to milk out extra performance from their huge matrix product blobs:
-Reasoning, which is just very long inference coupled with RL
-Tool use aka an LLM with glue code to call programs based on its output
-"Agents" aka LLMs with tools in a loop
Those are pretty neat tricks, and not at all trivial to get actionable results from (from an engineering point of view), mind you. But the days of the qualitative intelligence leaps from GPT-2 to 3, or 3 to 4, are over. Sure, benchmarks do get saturated, but at incredible cost and forcing AI researchers to make up new "dimensions of scaling" as the ones they were previously banking on stalled. And meanwhile it's all your basic next token prediction blob running it all, just with a few optimizing tricks.
My hunch is that there won't be a wondorous life turning AGI (poorly defined anyway), just consolidating existing gains (distillation, small language models, MoE, quality datasets, etc.) and finding new dimensions and sources of data (biological data and 'sense-data' for robotics come to mind).
This is the worst they’ll ever be! It’s not just going to be an ever slower asymptotic improvement that never quite manages to reach escape velocity but keeps costing orders of magnitude more to research, train, and operate….
I'm the first to call out ridiculous behavior by AI companies but short of something massively below expectations this can't be bad for openai. GPT-5 is going to be positioned as a product for the general public first and foremost. Not everyone cares about coding benchmarks.
OpenAI's announcements are generally a lot more grounded than the hype surrounding them and their stuff.
e.g. if you look at Altman's blog of "superintelligence in a few thousand days", what he actually wrote doesn't even disagreeing with LeCun (famously a nay-sayer) about the timeline.
