OpenAI's GPT-5 Development Faces Delays and Challenges

OpenAI's GPT-5 Project Said to Be Delayed Due to Data Crunch

The AI model is said to be under development for the last 18 months OpenAI is reportedly behind schedule with its GPT-5 development. As per the report, the AI firm has hit several roadblocks in taking the successor to GPT-4 to the desired level of capability, including training data shortage and the requirement of massive funds. The artificial intelligence (AI) model is said to be under development for more than 18 months, which is significantly higher than what the company originally planned. It also remains unclear when the large language model (LLM) might finally debut. The Wall Street Journal reported that the GPT-5 project, which is also codenamed Orion, is currently running behind schedule, and there is no clarity on when it might work, if at all. Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the publication claimed that the two main issues the AI firm is dealing with currently are the expenses of developing the model, and the lack of enough training data to make it intelligent enough. According to the report, OpenAI has conducted two large training sessions for GPT-5, where each session went on for months and took massive amounts of data. However, the company reportedly faced unexpected issues each time which stopped it from getting the desired results. Notably, a six-month long training period for GPT-5 is said to cost the company around $500,000,000 (roughly Rs. 4,260 crores). At present, GPT-5 is said to be marginally better than the existing AI models of OpenAI. However, it is reportedly not advanced enough to be lucrative to users and enterprises and cannot turn a profit given the massive cost of keeping it operational, people close to the project told the publication. As things stand, OpenAI will likely require several more training sessions to bring the AI model up to the desired level of intelligence. However, if the company is facing a data shortage, it can further delay the model's training. This delay has reportedly not pleased OpenAI's biggest backer Microsoft. The tech giant reportedly believed that GPT-5 would be released by mid-2024, however, that has not been the case.

OpenAI is struggling with ChatGPT-5 delays and rising costs

In a nutshell: OpenAI is still working on ChatGPT-5, the next generation of the company's multimodal large language model, but the project is reportedly struggling. Not only is ChatGPT-5 behind schedule after failing to launch this year, it's also costing the company a fortune. It was reported back in March that ChatGPT-5, which will supposedly offer plenty of enhanced, additional features over the current GPT-4o model, was being trained by OpenAI and set to launch soon. The end of the year is just over a week away, but there's still no sight of the next-gen version of ChatGPT. The Wall Street Journal has shed some light on why. GPT-5, codenamed Project Orion, has been in development for 18 months at Sam Altman's firm. Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest investor, expected it to be released in mid-2024. The WSJ's sources say OpenAI has already conducted at least two training runs designed to improve the model by training it with huge quantities of data. Those training runs have not gone too well, according to people close to the project. The initial run was said to be slower than expected, suggesting a larger full-scale training run would take an incredibly long time, pushing up the costs even further. It was concluded that more diverse, high-quality training data was neededs as the public internet didn't have enough to make GPT-5 noticeably "smarter" than its predecessor. One solution OpenAI is trying is hiring people to write fresh code or solve math problems for Orion to learn from, essentially creating training data from scratch. It's a slow process: GPT-4 was trained on an estimated 13 trillion tokens. A thousand people writing 5,000 words per day would take months to produce a billion tokens. OpenAI has also started developing synthetic data - data created by its current AI models - to train Orion. We've previously heard warnings about the sort of nonsensical garbage these AI feedback loops can create, though OpenAI believes the problems can be avoided by using data created by o1. The internal turmoil at the company hasn't helped matters. CEO Altman was ousted before quickly returning in late 2023, and more than two dozen key executives have left OpenAI this year. Altman previously blamed the release of o1 for GPT-5's delay. The billions of dollars being spent on all things AI-related continues to climb higher - investment that has yet to result in equal returns. OpenAI knows it needs to justify the expense of ChatGPT-5 by ensuring the model is a marked improvement over what came before, something that is proving more difficult as the internet's training data is being used up.

Reports: OpenAI's GPT-5 Is 'Behind Schedule' and Running Up 'Huge Bills'

The next generation of OpenAI's ChatGPT is "behind schedule" and running up "huge bills," according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. GPT-5 -- codenamed Project Orion -- was originally expected to be released in mid-2024 by OpenAI investor Microsoft, according to the WSJ's sources. But a raft of technical issues are plaguing the high-profile project. OpenAI has reportedly conducted at least two large "training runs," a term for when a large language model like ChatGPT crunches huge amounts of data with the goal of improving itself. But in these training runs, the software allegedly fell short of the results researchers were hoping for. One of the primary reasons behind these technical issues was the quality of the data. When these series of training runs began, researchers allegedly found that the data in question "wasn't as diversified as they had thought," which limited how much Orion would learn. In mid-2023, OpenAI launched one training run dubbed "Arrakis", which was reportedly "sluggish" and indicated that future training runs would take an "incredibly long time." This isn't the first time we've heard about the delays impacting GPT-5, though when CEO Sam Altman addressed the issue, he laid the blame on the company's focus on GPT-o1, a recently launched model that was built to cater to specialized scientific and academic use cases. The WSJ's report also nodded to the sheer number of high-profile executive exits that had plagued OpenAI this year, including co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. If OpenAI is slowing down, there are plenty of competitors who are eagerly waiting for their chance to take OpenAI's spot in the AI world and invest the capital needed to compete. In November, Amazon announced that it was set to invest another $4 billion into Claude AI parent and OpenAI rival Anthropic, bringing its total funding amount to $8 billion, as per Crunchbase. Earlier this month, Elon Musk's xAI announced it was set to quintuple the amount of GPUs at its disposal and expand its Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, to one day house at least a million GPUs.

OpenAI's GPT-5 Model Reportedly Behind Schedule With Uncertain Future | PYMNTS.com

As The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported late Friday (Dec. 20), there may not be enough data in the world to make the project, known as GPT-5 and code-named Orion, smart enough. GPT-5 has been in the works for more than 18 months, the report said, and is designed to be a major upgrade for the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT. Sources told WSJ that Microsoft -- OpenAI's biggest investor -- had expected to see GPT-5 by midyear. OpenAI has held at least two large training sessions, each of which involved months of crunching vast amounts of data to make Orion smarter. With each test run, sources close to the project told WSJ, new problems cropped up and the software fell short of the results for which researchers had hoped. In the best case scenario, the sources said, Orion outperforms OpenAI's current offerings, but hasn't progressed enough to justify the massive cost of running the new model. Six months of training run can cost roughly half a billion, WSJ said, based on public and private estimates of various aspects of the training. PYMNTS has contacted OpenAI for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. WSJ wrote that since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, AI companies have promised to unveil technology that could improve and become part of all human life. Analysts project that big tech companies could spend $1 trillion on AI projects in the years to come. That's put a lot of expectations on OpenAI, the report said. The company was valued at $157 billion in October, a figure predicated on CEO Sam Altman's prediction that GPT-5 will mark a "significant leap forward" in a range of subjects and tasks. PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about the pending release of GPT-5, arguing that it could mark a pivotal moment in AI development, or just be another smaller upgrade. With expectations of significant advancements, experts across various sectors are examining how this next-generation model could affect industries from healthcare to finance. "For commerce, the implications of a more advanced LLM [large language model] like GPT-5 are vast," Cache Merrill, the founder and CTO of Zibtek, an AI-based software company, told PYMNTS. "We could see significant improvements in customer service bots, offering more coherent and contextually appropriate interactions without human intervention. In digital marketing, content generation could become more sophisticated and tailored, enhancing engagement strategies. "Furthermore, enhanced LLMs could streamline operations such as contract analysis, risk assessment and more by quickly processing and analyzing large volumes of text-based data with a high degree of accuracy," Merrill added.