OpenAI chief outlines AGI plans and GPT-5 details

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, in an interview with Financial Times, said he intends to seek additional funding from Microsoft to build artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In his words, the partnership with the lead investor, in particular with the corporation’s CEO Satya Nadella, “is working very well”.

Earlier this year Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI under a “long-term” agreement. The San Francisco–based company was valued at $29 billion.

Altman noted there has been “revenue growth” for the project, without disclosing financial details. However, he explained that the firm remains unprofitable due to the high costs of training language models.

AGI is software based on AI that possesses human-level intelligence.

“People say: ‘You have this research lab, you have this API, you have this partnership with Microsoft, you have this thing called ChatGPT, and now a GPT store’. But in reality these are not our products. They are channels to our single product — artificial intelligence,” Altman said.

OpenAI now faces two tasks: exploring options for creating a “superintelligence” and scaling computing power for the process. According to Altman, ensuring the safety of AGI is an important issue.

Developers are also working on creating “autonomous agents” that can perform a range of tasks or actions such as making payments or sending emails.

In addition, Altman spoke about the next generation of the AI model — GPT-5. He did not name a specific launch date, but noted that training the AI will require a much larger amount of data.

While the neural network will be technically more complex than its predecessors, it is hard to say exactly what new capabilities the AI will have, added the OpenAI chief executive.

“There was a long period when, for Isaac Newton, it was right to read more mathematics textbooks, talk with professors and solve problems. That is what our current models are doing,” the company’s CEO said.

Earlier in November, OpenAI held a presentation, where it showcased turbo versions of ChatGPT and introduced a developer assistant.