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OpenAI touts GPT-5's enterprise capabilities, including

software

development and finance

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GPT-5 will be available to all 700 million ChatGPT users

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OpenAI faced challenges, delays when scaling up language

models

over past two years

By Anna Tong

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 7 (Reuters) - OpenAI launched on

Thursday its GPT-5 artificial intelligence model, the highly

anticipated latest installment of a technology that has helped

transform global business and culture.

OpenAI's GPT models are the AI technology that powers the

popular ChatGPT chatbot, and GPT-5 will be available to all 700

million ChatGPT users, OpenAI said.

The big question is whether the company that kicked off the

generative AI frenzy will be capable of continuing to drive

significant technological advancements that attract

enterprise-level users to justify the enormous sums of money it

is investing to fuel these developments.

The release comes at a critical time for the AI

industry. The world's biggest AI developers - Alphabet

, Meta, Amazon ( AMZN ) and Microsoft ( MSFT )

, which backs OpenAI - have dramatically increased

capital expenditures to pay for AI data centers, nourishing

investor hopes for great returns. These four companies expect to

spend nearly $400 billion this fiscal year in total.

OpenAI is now in early discussions to allow employees to cash

out at a $500 billion valuation, a huge step-up from its current

$300 billion valuation. Top AI researchers now command $100

million signing bonuses.

"So far, business spending on AI has been pretty weak, while

consumer spending on AI has been fairly robust because people

love to chat with ChatGPT," said economics writer Noah Smith.

"But the consumer spending on AI just isn't going to be nearly

enough to justify all the money that is being spent on AI data

centers."

OpenAI is emphasizing GPT-5's enterprise prowess. In

addition to software development, the company said GPT-5 excels

in writing, health-related queries, and finance.

"GPT-5 is really the first time that I think one of our

mainline models has felt like you can ask a legitimate expert, a

PhD-level expert, anything," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a

press briefing.

"One of the coolest things it can do is write you good

instantaneous software. This idea of software on demand is going

to be one of the defining features of the GPT-5 era."

One key measure of success is whether the step up from GPT-4 to

GPT-5 is on par with the research lab's previous improvements.

Two early reviewers told Reuters that while the new model

impressed them with its ability to code and solve science and

math problems, they believe the leap from the GPT-4 to GPT-5 was

not as large as OpenAI's prior improvements.

MORE THINKING

Nearly three years ago, ChatGPT introduced the world to

generative AI, dazzling users with its ability to write

humanlike prose and poetry, quickly becoming one of the fastest

growing apps ever.

In March 2023, OpenAI followed up ChatGPT with the release of

GPT-4, a large language model that made huge leaps forward in

intelligence. While GPT-3.5, an earlier version, received a bar

exam score in the bottom 10%, GPT-4 passed the simulated bar

exam in the top 10%.

GPT-4's leap was based on more compute power and data, and the

company was hoping that "scaling up" in a similar way

would consistently lead to improved AI models.

But OpenAI ran into issues scaling up. One problem was the data

wall the company ran into, and OpenAI's former chief scientist

Ilya Sutskever said last year that while processing power was

growing, the amount of data was not.

He was referring to the fact that large language models are

trained on massive datasets that scrape the entire internet, and

AI labs have no other options for large troves of

human-generated textual data.

Apart from the lack of data, another problem was that 'training

runs' for large models are more likely to have hardware-induced

failures given how complicated the system is, and researchers

may not know the eventual performance of the models until the

end of the run, which can take months.

At the same time, OpenAI discovered another route to smarter AI,

called "test-time compute," a way to have the AI model spend

more time compute power "thinking" about each question, allowing

it to solve challenging tasks such as math or complex operations

that demand advanced reasoning and decision-making.

GPT-5 acts as a router, meaning if a user asks GPT-5 a

particularly hard problem, it will use test-time compute to

answer the question.

This is the first time the general public will have access

to OpenAI's test-time compute technology, something that Altman

said is important to the company's mission to build AI that

benefits all of humanity.

Altman believes the current investment in AI is still

inadequate.

"We need to build a lot more infrastructure globally to have

AI locally available in all these markets," Altman said.