OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says ChatGPT is a ‘channel’, aims for ‘magic intelligence in the sky’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made a startling revelation in an interview with the Financial Times, where he said that the company's most notable creations such as ChatGPT or DALL-E are not really the company's product, but rather "channels" into a single product that is " magic intelligence in t

During the Financial Times interview, Altman said, “Right now, people [say] ‘you have this research lab, you have this API [software], you have the partnership with Microsoft, you have this ChatGPT thing, now there is a GPT store’. But those aren’t really our products…Those are channels into our one single product, which is intelligence, magic intelligence in the sky. I think that’s what we’re about.”

GPT-5 coming soon? 

Sam Altman, who recently released a version of ChatGPT with GPT-4 Turbo at OpenAI's first developer day, said the artificial intelligence startup is working on the next-gen AI model GPT-5, but declined to give a timeline for its release.

Altman also told the FT that the data used to train GPT-5 will come from a combination of publicly available datasets on the web and proprietary data from companies.

The OpenAI CEO informed that it won't be possible for him to guess what capabilities the model might possess before it goes to training. He said, “Until we go train that model, it’s like a fun guessing game for us…We’re trying to get better at it, because I think it’s important from a safety perspective to predict the capabilities. But I can’t tell you here’s exactly what it’s going to do that GPT-4 didn’t.”

Custom agents will get more powerful, says Sam Altman: 

Speaking about the newly launched custom GPTs, Altman said, “We will make these agents more and more powerful . . . and the actions will get more and more complex from here,” he said. “The amount of business value that will come from being able to do that in every category, I think, is pretty good.”

OpenAI had announced the custom GPTs in a blog post recently claiming that users will be able to create their own version of ChatGPT and share them publicly, while a GPT store will launch later this month to help verified developers monetise their offering.