NEW YORK — OpenAI released a keenly awaited new generation of its hallmark ChatGPT, touting “significant” advancements in artificial intelligence capabilities as a global race over the technology accelerates.
ChatGPT-5 is rolling out free to all users of the AI tool, which is used by nearly 700 million people weekly, OpenAI said in a briefing with journalists.
Co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman touted this latest iteration as “clearly a model that is generally intelligent.”
Altman cautioned that there is still work to be done to achieve the kind of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that thinks the way people do.
“This is not a model that continuously learns as it is deployed from new things it finds, which is something that, to me, feels like it should be part of an AGI,” Altman said.
“But the level of capability here is a huge improvement.”
Industry analysts have heralded the arrival of an AI era in which genius computers transform how humans work and play.
“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a recent memo.
“I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity,” Zuckerberg added according to AFP.
Altman said there were “orders of magnitude more gains” to come on the path toward AGI.
“Obviously… you have to invest in compute (power) at an eye watering rate to get that, but we intend to keep doing it.”
Tech industry rivals Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s xAI have been pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence since the blockbuster launch of the first version of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Chinese startup DeepSeek shook up the AI sector early this year with a model that delivers high performance using less costly chips.
