(Given the likely training time for Orion, which became GPT4.5, this seems to be in line with Altman’s reputation for misleading statements).
I don’t think this holds—there was just under 2 years between the letter and the 4.5 release, so I doubt a 6 month pause would have affected training timelines for 4.5 directly.
I’m glad you brought this up, because it is a little difficult to be certain. Here’s how I came to my conclusion.
Altman said that they wouldn’t be training GPT-5 for some time in ~April 2023. Then in December 2024 the Wall Street Journal said that Orion, which would become GPT-4.5, had “been in the works for more than 18 months”. That would put the start of training around June 2023.
So when Altman said they won’t be training GPT-5 “for some time” it’s plausible he meant ~60 days or that he didn’t consider Orion/GPT-4.5 the same thing as GPT-5 (again, it’s hard to tell what OpenAI’s internal designations were for all their training runs). But Altman’s comments were made in response to the letter, which asks for a pause on training anything more powerful than GPT-4. Hence I think his statement is misleading.
From what I can tell the failure of Orion/GPT-4.5 to demonstrate impressive gains was crucial for OpenAI’s pivot into the thinking model O1-O4 series. So if they had paused for six months that would have meant a training run would have begun in October 2023, and that failure and pivot would have happened later.
The broader point is that the US labs have never slowed down and have instead looked for ways to accelerate. From their perspective that’s rational, but the article is about how China does seem to have some priorities that will cause them to put a functional pause on AI acceleration.
I don’t think this holds—there was just under 2 years between the letter and the 4.5 release, so I doubt a 6 month pause would have affected training timelines for 4.5 directly.
I’m glad you brought this up, because it is a little difficult to be certain. Here’s how I came to my conclusion.
Altman said that they wouldn’t be training GPT-5 for some time in ~April 2023. Then in December 2024 the Wall Street Journal said that Orion, which would become GPT-4.5, had “been in the works for more than 18 months”. That would put the start of training around June 2023.
So when Altman said they won’t be training GPT-5 “for some time” it’s plausible he meant ~60 days or that he didn’t consider Orion/GPT-4.5 the same thing as GPT-5 (again, it’s hard to tell what OpenAI’s internal designations were for all their training runs). But Altman’s comments were made in response to the letter, which asks for a pause on training anything more powerful than GPT-4. Hence I think his statement is misleading.
From what I can tell the failure of Orion/GPT-4.5 to demonstrate impressive gains was crucial for OpenAI’s pivot into the thinking model O1-O4 series. So if they had paused for six months that would have meant a training run would have begun in October 2023, and that failure and pivot would have happened later.
The broader point is that the US labs have never slowed down and have instead looked for ways to accelerate. From their perspective that’s rational, but the article is about how China does seem to have some priorities that will cause them to put a functional pause on AI acceleration.