When Will ChatGPT-5 Be Released (Latest Info)
It’s been a few months since the release of ChatGPT-4o, the most capable version of ChatGPT yet. However, GPT-5 might be just around the corner.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, hasn’t publicly announced a release date for GPT-5.
Nevertheless, various clues — including interviews with Open AI CEO Sam Altman — indicate that GPT-5 could launch quite soon.
In this article, we’ll analyze these clues to estimate when ChatGPT-5 will be released. We’ll also discuss just how much more powerful the new AI tool will be compared to previous versions.
ChatGPT-5 Release Date
According to the latest available information, ChatGPT-5 is set to be released sometime in late 2024 or early 2025.
This estimate is based on public statements by OpenAI, interviews with Sam Altman, and timelines of previous GPT model launches.
For background and context, OpenAI published a blog post in May 2024 confirming that it was in the process of developing a successor to GPT-4.
However, the existence of GPT-5 had already been all but confirmed months prior.
In September 2023, Sam Altman gave a speech at his former venture capital firm, Y Combinator. He publicly confirmed that GPT-5 and GPT-6 were “in the bag.”
A few months later, in November, he told the Financial Times that OpenAI was actively working on GPT-5.
And in January, Altman gave an interview on Bill Gates’ podcast, in which he confirmed that OpenAI was actively developing GPT-5.
Despite these confirmations that ChatGPT-5 is, in fact, being created, OpenAI has yet to announce an official release date.
Why GPT-5 Might Be Released Soon
While ChatGPT was revolutionary on its launch a few years ago, it’s now just one of several powerful AI tools.
With competitors pouring billions of dollars into AI research, development, and marketing, OpenAI needs to ensure it remains competitive in the AI arms race.
The company has released major updates in short timeframes before.
For example, ChatGPT-4 was released just three months after GPT-3.5. Therefore, it’s not unreasonable to expect GPT-5 to be released just months after GPT-4o.
In fact, OpenAI has left several hints that GPT-5 will be released in 2024.
In March, Sam Altman was interviewed on the Lex Fridman Podcast. He told Lex that OpenAI plans to release an “amazing new model this year.”
Altman could have been referring to GPT-4o, which was released a couple of months later. However, it’s also possible that he meant GPT-5.
If Altman’s plans come to fruition, then GPT-5 will be released this year.
Additionally, Business Insider published a report about the release of GPT-5 around the same time as Altman’s interview with Lex Fridman. Sources told Business Insider that GPT-5 would be released during the summer of 2024.
According to Business Insider, certain enterprise customers — organizations subscribed to ChatGPT Enterprise, the highest tier currently available — have been granted early access to demo versions of GPT-5.
However, the new model still needs to complete its training. It also needs to be safety tested. Both of these processes could significantly delay the release date.
Why GPT-5 Might Be Released Late
Safety testing is likely the largest hurdle facing GPT-5’s release.
ChatGPT (and AI tools in general) have generated significant controversy for their potential implications for customer privacy and corporate safety.
OpenAI has already incorporated several features to improve the safety of ChatGPT. For example, independent cybersecurity analysts conduct ongoing security audits of the tool. They attempt to find vulnerabilities, which are then patched.
OpenAI also runs a “bug bounty” program, which rewards people for finding and reporting security flaws in ChatGPT.
However, many still have safety concerns about AI.
In March 2023, for example, Italy banned ChatGPT, citing how the tool collected personal data and did not verify user age during registration. The following month, Italy recognized that OpenAI had fixed the identified problems and allowed it to resume ChatGPT service in the country.
In May 2023, Sam Altman testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in favor of government regulation to “mitigate the risks” of AI tools. Altman recognized the widespread fears about the potential dangers of AI, including misuse, and argued in favor of an agency with the power to license AI tools — and “take that license away” to “ensure compliance with safety standards.”
It would be catastrophic for OpenAI to press for stringent safety standards and then fall short itself.
Therefore, it’s likely that the safety testing for GPT-5 will be rigorous.
Altman said as much to Bloomberg earlier this year. He indicated that OpenAI will “take its time” to ensure that GPT-5 is something it feels “good about and responsible about.”
On May 28, 2024, the same day that OpenAI formally announced the successor to GPT-4, the company also announced the formation of a Safety and Security Committee. The OpenAI Board tasked the committee with “making recommendations to the full board on critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations.”
The committee’s first job is to “evaluate and further develop OpenAI’s processes and safeguards over the next 90 days.” That period ends on August 26, 2024. After the 90 days, the committee will share its safety recommendations with the OpenAI board, after which the company will publicly release its new security protocol.
GPT-5’s own safety testing could take months.
Reports indicate that the model is still in the training phase. After it completes its training, it will be extensively tested for security. That involves the model being “red teamed,” a process in which internal and external testers attempt to find flaws and vulnerabilities in the model, which can then be addressed.
On the one hand, this testing might not bring up any major issues. If so, GPT-5 might therefore be released imminently.
On the other hand, there’s really no limit to the number of issues that safety testing could expose. Delays necessitated by patching vulnerabilities and other security issues could push the release of GPT-5 well into 2025.
The uncertainty of this process is likely why OpenAI has so far refused to commit to a release date for GPT-5.
ChatGPT-5 Features
Altman and OpenAI have also been somewhat vague about what exactly ChatGPT-5 will be able to do. That’s probably because the model is still being trained and its exact capabilities are yet to be determined.
However, Altman has hinted at some of the things GPT-5 will be capable of.
What is the Capability of GPT-5?
“It’s not like this model is going to get a little bit better,” Altman said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February. “It’s going to be better across the board.”
Generally, then, GPT-5 should be significantly "smarter" than its predecessors.
In practice, that could mean better contextual understanding, which in turn means responses that are more relevant to the question and the overall conversation. It also means fewer hallucinations.
Smarter also means improvements to the architecture of neural networks behind ChatGPT. In turn, that means a tool able to more quickly and efficiently process data.
Smarter could also mean more extensive training.
OpenAI is training GPT-5 on vast amounts of data.
Most of that training data is scraped from the internet. But a significant proportion of its training data is proprietary — that is, purchased or otherwise acquired from organizations.
These proprietary datasets could cover specific areas that are relatively absent from the publicly available data taken from the internet. Specialized knowledge areas, specific complex scenarios, under-resourced languages, and long conversations are all examples of things that could be targeted by using appropriate proprietary data.
In theory, this additional training should grant GPT-5 better knowledge of complex or niche topics. It will hopefully also improve ChatGPT’s abilities in languages other than English.
GPT-5 is also expected to be more customizable than previous versions.
Individuals and organizations will hopefully be able to better personalize the AI tool to improve how it performs for specific tasks.
Finally, smarter also means multimodal. GPT-4 is partially multimodal; it is able to process images. More recent updates have allowed ChatGPT to process audio, too. These updates “had a much stronger response than we expected,” Altman told Bill Gates in January. “We’ll be able to push that much further” in GPT-5.
Just exactly how far OpenAI will push multimodality is unclear. According to Altman, it means “speech in, speech out. Images. Eventually video.”
“Maybe the most important areas of progress,” Altman told Bill Gates, “will be around reasoning ability.
All this “is a bigger deal than it sounds,” Altman claimed at the World Government’s Summit in Dubai. “What makes these models so magical is that they’re general,” he explained. “If it’s a little bit smarter, it’s a little better at everything.”
Will ChatGPT-5 Be Sentient?
It’s almost certain that GPT-5 will be smarter than ChatGTP-4 and ChatGTP-4o. If Altman’s promises come true, it will be better at everything.
But does this mean just another incremental improvement to AI tools, or does it mean the arrival of AGI?
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is the concept of machine intelligence on par with human cognition. A robot with AGI would be able to undertake many tasks with abilities equal to or better than those of a human.
A famous scenario used to demonstrate — or perhaps test for — the presence of AGI is called the Coffee Test. It was created by Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. The Coffee Test goes as follows: Imagine standing in your kitchen, and seeing a robot strolling in and making a cup of coffee. The robot was not programmed to walk into your kitchen, find the coffee maker, locate the correct ingredients, and brew a great cup of coffee. Yet it still decided to do so, and managed it.
The prospect of AGI is both exciting and terrifying. Major tech leaders, including Elon Musk, have warned that it is not far off. In March 2023, thousands of experts signed an open letter calling on AI labs to “immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
A few months after this letter, OpenAI announced that it would not train a successor to GPT-4. This was part of what prompted a much-publicized battle between the OpenAI Board and Sam Altman later in 2023. Altman, who wanted to keep developing AI tools despite widespread safety concerns, eventually won that power struggle.
Despite all this worry about AGI, and predictions that it will arrive soon, GPT-5 is unlikely to make AGI a reality.
The model may be able to act more autonomously than previous models. For example, businesses might be able to build autonomous AI agents that could schedule events, respond to emails, and make purchases without direct human oversight.
In this sense, OpenAI has claimed that GPT-5 could “bridge the gap between human and machine communication” through its improved capabilities and better conversational experience.
But GPT-5 almost certainly won’t be sentient.
How Will ChatGPT-5 Be Different Than Previous Models?
Nevertheless, GPT-5 will certainly be a great deal more capable than GPT-4. No one has been more clear about this than Sam Altman.
In March 2024, Altman told Lex Fridman that GPT-4 “kind of sucks.” He said that “the delta between 5 and 4 will be the same as between 4 and 3.… It is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are going to kind of suck looking backward at them.”
The Difference Between GPT-5 and GPT-4
We’ve actually covered many of the differences between GPT-5 and GPT-4 already. Multimodality is perhaps the most flashy difference. Improvements to customization, speed, power, and efficiency will all also be noticeable.
One improvement Altman has highlighted is reliability. AI tools, including the most powerful versions of ChatGPT, still have a tendency to hallucinate. They can get facts incorrect and even invent things seemingly out of thin air, especially when working in languages other than English.
“If you ask GPT-4 most questions 10,000 times,” Altman explained to Bill Gates, “one of those 10,000 is probably pretty good, but it doesn’t always know which one — and you’d like to get the best response of 10,000 each time.”
Altman implied that GPT-5 will be better able to identify that great response. That is, GPT-5 will be more reliable than GPT-4.
Additionally, GPT-5 will have far more powerful reasoning abilities than GPT-4. Currently, Altman explained to Gates, “GPT-4 can reason in only extremely limited ways.” GPT-5’s improved reasoning ability could make it better able to respond to complex queries and hold longer conversations.
In large part, that’s because GPT-5 is being trained on a much larger dataset than GPT-4.
GPT-4 is Already Much Smarter Than GPT-3
As Altman noted, GPT-4 was already a significant improvement to GPT-3.
For starters, GPT-3 is unimodal. It can only process text inputs. Additionally, it was trained on a much lower volume of data than GPT-4. That means lesser reasoning abilities, more difficulties with complex topics, and other similar disadvantages.
GPT-3 also has far fewer parameters than GPT-4. Parameters essentially determine how an AI model behaves. The number and quality of the parameters guiding an AI tool’s behavior are therefore vital in determining how capable that AI tool will perform.
In general, more parameters mean a more powerful AI. GPT-3 had roughly 175 billion parameters. While the number of parameters in GPT-4 has not officially been released, estimates have ranged from 1.5 to 1.8 trillion.
Conclusion
Ultimately, until OpenAI officially announces a release date for ChatGPT-5, we can only estimate when this new model will be made public.
There are a number of reasons to believe it will come soon — perhaps as soon as late summer 2024.
But training and safety issues could push the release well into 2025.
