And after GPT-5's release, what would be the plan for subsequent elections? This seems to be a temporary play in delaying AI regulation if public sentiment further becomes that AI can have a strong influence in the elections.
It’s absolutely temporary, but 4 years feels like an eternity in this field and the m sure the major players would love to have that much time to entrench themselves before they have to battle “AI ban” legislation.
(assuming you are correct) It says something about how a company feels about the safety of their products when they feel like they should time the releases based on political events.
This is speculation because I don’t think any of the key players ever explicitly stated this is their strategy, but this year it feels like there’s some significant foot dragging on things like Sora and GPT-5. The big AI players really don’t want AI to become an election year punching bag and don’t want any major campaign promises around AI to placate a spooked electorate. And they really don’t want it to be revealed that generative AI powered bot armies outnumber real human political discourse 10-1. And they absolutely do not want an AI generated hoax video to have a measurable effect on the polls.
It’s a stopgap. If we get through this election without a major public freak out, it gives the industry 4 more years to take LLMs out to the point of diminishing returns and figure out safety before we get knee jerk regulation.
Here's something that talks about it. I can't speak for the legitimacy, but I'm not pulling it out of my ass. They may be pulling it out of theirs. :-)
I've listened to so many interviews that I couldn't tell you who said what at this point, but that is what I understood from somewhere. So, sure, take it as speculation.
I also believe that gpt-4o was originally called gpt-5. If you look at the image generation on their website from gpt-4o which has not been released, I believe that along with the voice caused Ilya to declare mission accomplished (AGI) and that is why there was a coup. The coup failed because no one wanted to wrap up the company or change the way it operated because they would lose a lot of money.
The reason the name was changed was because there was a big public scare about gpt-5 taking over and so Altman had to promise not to release gpt-5 soon. So they changed the name to gpt-4o (omni). Which is A) obviously dramatically a different architecture, B) a huge step up in capabilities (most still unreleased) C) very general purpose. Because of A) and B), this should obviously be a new major version (5).
Yes, this is speculation, but it's very obvious speculation to me. It's weird for me that most people not only don't share this view but seem to absolutely hate when I say it.
I don't hate this speculation, I just don't buy it at all. 4o's about the same in terms of reasoning as 4. People don't find the text abilities that much more usable over 4 (at least on the LMS leaderboard). It's faster and has audio2audio capabilities alongside new native image stuff I think, but how exactly is that AGI if 4 isn't? These models understanding and reasoning ability is still far too weak to do any serious economic shifts yet.
It's speculation with no basis at all, OAI has a track record of releasing half step models and 4o is no different just like 3 to 3.5 and the numerous subsequent 3.5 releases.
If you've used 4 and 4o they are too similar for 4o to have been trained from scratch
