OpenAI's Sam Altman (CEO), Kevin Weil (Chief Product Officer), Srinivas Narayanan (VP Engineering), Mark Chen (SVP of Research), and Jakub Pachocki (Chief Scientist) did an AMA on Reddit last week to answer all your pressing questions about what's next at the company. Here are the highlights from the Q&A session.
Will ChatGPT eventually be able to perform tasks on its own? Message you first?
Weil: IMHO this is going to be a big theme in 2025.
Opinion on people using ChatGPT for therapy?
Altman: it's obviously not a therapist, but clearly a lot of people get value out of talking about their problems with it. we have seen a lot of startups really exploring how to do more here; i hope someone builds something great!
When will you guys give us a new text to image model? Dalle 3 is kinda outdated
Altman: the next update will be worth the wait! but we don't have a release plan yet.
What's one thing you wish ChatGPT could do but can't yet?
Narayanan: I'd love for it to understand my personal information better and take actions on my behalf.
What are the unique advantages or key differentiators of SearchGPT that would make it worthwhile for a typical search engine user to choose it?
Altman: for many queries, i find it to be a way faster/easier way to get the information i'm looking for. i think we'll see this especially for queries that require more complex research. i also look forward to a future where a search query can dynamically render a custom web page in response!
Release date of chatgpt-5 or its equivalent? What are its features?
Altman: we have some very good releases coming later this year! nothing that we are going to call gpt-5, though.
Seriously though — what did Ilya see?
Altman: the transcendent future. ilya is an incredible visionary and sees the future more clearly than almost anyone else. his early ideas, excitement, and vision were critical to so much of what we have done, for example he was one of the key initial explorers and champions for some of the ideas that eventually became o1. the field is very lucky to have him.
Once AGI is achieved, what's the first thing you would like to apply it on? Is there a certain field on speed dial for that moment?
Narayanan: i'd love for it to accelerate scientific discovery. i'm personally very interested in health/medicine
Do you guys have any plans to increase the memory ChatGPT can store?
Weil: Do you mean longer context windows? If so, yes.
Is AGI achievable with known hardware or will it take something entirely different?
Altman: we believe it is achievable with current hardware
What is the best use case of ChatGPT you have seen in the wild so far?
Altman: there are a lot of great ones, but the stories of people figuring out the cause of a debilitating disease and then getting fully cured are really awesome to hear.
Is sora being delayed due to the amount of compute/time required for inference or due to safety?
Weil: Need to perfect the model, need to get safety/impersonation/other things right, and need to scale compute!
Check out the full AMA on Reddit.